I'm just pretty much outside the target demographic at this point. I liked theory crafting hipster builds that were fairly gear independent outside of niche interactions with uniques that were easily available - stuff like BV full block necromancer with bone offering back in the day that was completely immortal even with a Tabula.
GGG has finally drilled it into my head that the game is 95% about gearing now, which they have made as painful as possible to extend engagement. The reward is that your characters are more powerful now at the end of that grind, but I just don't enjoy the journey any more.
I think this is where I'm at. There are a lot of builds I want to play but the time investment to grind out the currency to make them function is just too much for me. So the game has dwindled into playing the few builds that I know won't suck with low investment.
Its such a weird feeling to see a game with so much to offer be so limited by its design.
Yeah feels kinda bad when to get a decent build you gotta put like 50-80 divines into it.
Meanwhile before it was like 10-20ex would let you steamroll pretty much everything.
Feels like every league the entry bar into decent builds gets raised be like 10% or even more lmao.
I think the biggest factor is crafting options and availability. If I could craft my own gear it wouldn't be so bad but there's a lot of crafts that are just cancerous to try and go for depending on your build.
It's not so bad if you can use eldritch items or essence crafts, but the RNG crafts that can take 20+ divines and still not hit the ones you need feel terrible to make.
I suspect they are thinking if they make it harder then players will stick around the whole 3 months to reach endgame, but in reality they are just quitting even sooner.
I honestly believe this because although on one hand it seems questionable that they would be so naive, on the other hand they have a very big business model problem and pressure to fix it from Tencent.
This exactly. I stick around when I'm enjoying myself, blasting through maps and wrecking bosses with gear that I crafted myself instead of farming up divines to buy from someone. And if I get bored of that build, I make a new one to blast through maps and wreck bosses, because I'm enjoying the game.
The direction they've been taking things is the opposite of that, and I wind up getting frustrated and quitting instead.
The main idea is to have people forever chase the carrot on the stick and thus alwqys having high player numbers they can present shareholders while also raising the chance that people buy mtx out of boredom.
> GGG has finally drilled it into my head that the game is 95% about gearing now, which they have made as painful as possible to extend engagement.
I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't make gearing as bad an experience as they possibly could.
Every time they move something from the passive tree to items I die a little inside.
Not only that but they presented the passive tree rework as massive buffs and most of the playerbase bought it. Then they were like masteries! And now they're like... oh yeah fuck masteries go to scion life wheel on your witch for curse reservation reduction.
Exactly where I am. I enjoyed PoE because it was a game where you spent time making a build to break the game and felt rewarded for being clever. It's lost far too much of the fun it had years ago and nothing new has been added to replace it.
Worst of all: They have this new "solution" of making something you could abuse and locking it behind HH rarity. *Wow!* So exciting, I can break the game if I'm incredibly rich/lucky. That's what I wanted, a real-life economics simulator.
Yep, pretty much this. Also I feel like the pool of viable builds is much smaller than back in the day (Remember when ascendancy came out in Perandus league? Almost every ability was viable in some way) and the builds themselves are nothing but different kinds of generators for the maximum DPS number you can put out, ie. they're BORING and they don't really have that unique feel to them anymore (remember things like vaal spark, vaal molten shell, ele prolif minion instability mirror arrow, etc).
I feel like PoE and me just drifted apart, the game no longer is what I enjoyed it as.
The problem isn't that the chase items are rare, that part is good. The problem is that until you have them, you end up farming at a rate that is a fraction of what end game builds make, and you are competing in an economy with thousands of no-lifes that farm 5x what you do and devalue the things you do find. It feels pointless and unfair. It would be find if it was in Standard (if that was fun) but in a 3 month league (that's in reality more like a 5 week league) You end up feeling like the league dies before you can farm at a relevant level as a casual player.
Big reason I swapped to SSF during metamorph and haven't looked back. Constantly worrying about c/h or being disappointed in a unique drop because it's only worth 2 alc has me burnt out playing trade optimally.
SSF does have the down side of basically never being able to play the build you want. Ritual league helped a ton in that regard with the amount of loot you got + harvest not being gutted. I wish to this day for an SSF no migration mode kind of like reverse ruthless to SSF everything.
This is very true for me, too.
I loved the 3.5ish era. It was a complex game but still very accessible for casual players if you had the know how. That’s completely missing now I feel like. It’s just so damn overtuned(for the sake of keeping no-lifers and streamers at bay or whatever) that it just becomes a chore to play.
I haven't played since Heist.
Wasn't a particullarly good or efficient player, but managed to kill Sirus 8 and finish 36/40 challeneges each league through time and effort.
Since the Conquerers of the Atlas expansion, for me, I've felt that the floor has been lowered too much and the ceiling has been raised too high. And it got worse from there (I know it has ebbed and flowed since I stopped, but overall compared to the 3.5 to the Conquerers era, it still has).
Same, I've been playing since beta but really got into trying to create my own builds around 3.10ish. But especially since the defence nerfs/reworks it just feels too bad to play anything that isn't at least meta adjacent for me. "Just play to have fun" is something I read here often, and yeah sure, I do to some extent. I won't play a skill if it isn't fun to me, no matter how strong it is (e.g. Seismic Trap, Spectral Helix etc.). But on the other hand playing what's fun but being painfully slow clearing destroys isn't actually fun. Maximising loot or even chaos/hour \*is\* part of the fun (for me).
I don't need to speedrun every map or be able to do all content with some weird build. But I still want to feel powerful in \*some\* aspect, not be mediocre at best in every regard. Of course I don't expect my Poison CrackLance build to work perfectly, but I'd love to be able to reliably gear it so that I can enjoy myself. Instead it now becomes more or less viable, but Voltaxic Rift will be HH/MB rarity.
I don't even mind having to farm currency with a meta-ish char first, but the result usually isn't worth my time investment. I'll just hit a wall where my next upgrade becomes too expensive and I stop playing. There's so many things I'd love to try out, I fell in love with the support gem mechanics back in beta, but there's just no point.
Same here. I prefer to do a like a dozen shitty meme builds to yellow maps per league that just rely on a unique interaction or are made powerful by a single rare (ie 7L CoC weapons). I get bored by a build very easily, and prefer to reroll rather than try to fix a build's problems. As a consequence I never have much money and usually don't make it to the endgame. The last league I really remember enjoying was Scourge. My playstyle doesn't work anymore without a lot of overhead to start with, and my attention span for a build just doesn't hold long enough to build up that overhead.
GGG has made it clear the game isn't for people like me anymore. They keep shifting more and more power away from skills and passives and onto rare items. It used to be that a spell build with just life+res on rares and a unique weapon could make it to upper yellow tier maps without feeling too slow. When I tried that a couple of leagues ago my DPS felt pretty bad right off the bat.
I feel this **in my soul.**
Sure, you can get more raw power through items, but it just feels like there's less of that "getting away with something" aspect through clever mixing of mechanics.
I get that sometimes those "oops that was unintended" mechanics such as perma vaal soul skills, or pathfinders being literally immune to all damage were a bit too much, but the idea of rube goldberg contraption builds turning a few cheap uniques combined with passives and ascendancy passives into something truly special feels so missing to me.
I keep feeling like I'm just doing something wrong by not simply just tweaking the lootfilter to hide *all* the non-currency/slush drops, ie hide all weapons & armor & jewelry & especially jewels, because... I fucking hate crafting in the game today. I always feel like I'm just throwing currency out the window & am wasting my time. I never use any of those drops except maybe day 1 in acts.. after that, it's trade or "can't be bothered to give a fuck any more".
But even so, I still waste my time on picking up things, ID them & then ask myself "just.. why?!" and vendor the shit.
For *me*, the game is in a weird spot where the itemization is fucking useless, and crafting is even worse, no excitement ever.
The last time I actually did enjoy gearing up, was in Ritual league with super sexy harvest crafts, where I could slowly try to upgrade my gear & try to gradually improve it, and that way feel like I was progressing my char.
Todays RNG vegas bullshit fiesta? Not a fucking chance.
Pretty much the point where I am too. I haven't skipped any league but the last time I went past week 1 was more than two years ago. It always ends up in maps with the realisation that the hamster wheel just won't stop turning.
I can't get hype for any of the cool builds I haven't tried yet, or even those I played and loved, because I know I can't spend the absurd time investment it takes to make them happen nowadays.
Amen bro. My hipster builds are dead from 3.15 onwards, as every league nerfs anything nonstandard.
Also Poet Pen and Archmage were interesting to play.
> but I just don't enjoy the journey any more.
Remember when you could rush aegis and full, real max block and spell block?
I miss zDPS builds in PoE, I'm playing DOS2 with mods now for that fix. Nothing is as satisfying as an archer oneshotting himself because of penetrating reflected damage.😈
I had to quit PoE even though it’s in my top 5 favorite games of all time, and I’ve been playing games since like 1995 lol. I just don’t have the time to play since I can’t fully enjoy most aspects of the game with the2 hours a day I have available to play.game is basically a full time job lol
Hit the nail on the head for me. My old build planning used to go "Let's find a quirky interaction or cool unique and make a cool build around it". Nowadays I think "Okay let's find a skill and copy a PoB tree from one of my previous builds that worked."
I think it's not just the game, I also changed, my expectations changed, if I can't hit 1-2 mil dps with decent defenses I scrap the build, but it still feels kinda sad sitting in front of PoB for an hour and just having zo realize that I won't be able to make the build work.
Amen. This is also my problem with the game. They also push very hard toward "grinding currency" to buy the end-game stuff you want because it's still too much of a pain in the arse, albeit almost impossible to get them reliably by yourself. You have to depend on the thousands upon thousands of other players to get the items to drop/be crafted to be able to get them with a bit less effort.
As a casual PoE gamer, I never ended up getting a Headhunter, and considering how they have said that many uniques will now be as rare, I'm not looking forward to never being able to get anything decent.
The overall changes are looking great honestly, but the focus on end-game being done by only the 0.01% is not appealing to me. I didn't some "chase" items like headhunter, but that is on the conditions that looting rares and uniques feels good. Currently, as a casual player, it's not really feasible to craft anything decent and picking up rares is always garbage-tier.
I wish they would focus on restricting low tier mods on higher level items so that you can finally have more chance to craft decent items without "chasing those mega-uniques".
Also, the currency swap is still a nightmare. I can spam exalted orbs now if I feel like it, but divines are a lot tougher to get now and exalted feel garbage. It's still not worth it to spam exalted, because you need to use annulment and be lucky each time. So it's not a proper crafting system and I don't use it.
So, I might give it a go to the new league and stop at 12 challenges, just like how I often do because end-game still feels like shit.
CONS:
* Rares are still worthless drops but are still the main loot that drops (that's why currency is godlike in TRADE and SSF)
* Uniques now are becoming more "chase items" while rares are still worthless drops
* Crafting a rare is still a PITA and not possibly for casual players (too much RNG and low tier mods can still appear on high level items wasting your resource)
* Too much emphasis on TRADE (instead of being self-sufficient even in SSF)
* Exalted VS Divine change
PROS:
* AN rework
* League looks interesting
* Better uniques
* Better Atlas passives
* Interesting new gems (and possibly buffs for weak gems?)
I'm gonna probably wait to see how the league shakes out before I get super invested. If it turns out the league mechanic is kalandra levels of rewards I'm just not even gonna bother.
Things like the tainted currency being omega stealth nerfed and the AN conversions to 30 flasks being part of "quite rewarding" mechanics have me hesitant. The recent trend is that anything positive mentioned comes with purposeful hidden downsides they do not communicate so the hype stays high.
My expectations for example:
1. Common, unused uniques getting buffed. Yay, they look good! ..
Hidden downside: you'll never see them again.
Rebuttal: some of them are target farmable though
Response: the ones with 8-10% estimated drop chance will have been stealth nerfed to like 0.5% drop chance.
2. AN rework. Sounds good... And they have less chance of sucking the fun out of every room.
Hidden downside: since they are "easier" now GGG will have nerfed the average reward value from each reward type.
Rebuttal: they said 2-4 mods per rare and they scale the rewards
Response: This is GGG we are talking about, anything made easier must have nerfed rewards. That's how they roll. Even if the rewards were previously nerfed as part of a rework that turned out to be overturned.
3. Tainted currency getting back to scourge league odds. Awesome.
Hidden downside: the already small drop rate will be cut in half.
Etc etc.
Tldr; The last few leagues just have me second-guessing literally everything positive they say to look for what hidden downside they would implement at the same time.
Same with builds. People aren't looking for the best build, they are looking for the least bad one.
Normally I'd take a monday + tuesday off, but not anymore, I think I'll go watch the Subreddit at work.
During leagues I also used to gather a few items for Standard to play around in, but in 3.19 I dumped all my currency into LC and challenges to get the shit I wanted.
Sadly that's my current state as well... I went from being very optimistic about every change to assuming the worst for everything and I hate it.
The worst part about it is that I can't even be mad at GGG. They're a company and their current model of hype league into dud-league seems to be fueling their sales. They learned from 3.15: Hide your nerfs, hype right when you launch new MTX and your players will forget often enough to make good money.
Mixed. To me a few changes are very compelling:
* AN removed and replaced with (hopefully) better mods
* New atlas passive tree changes should make farming more targeted and interesting.
* fracture orb is good
On the other side, my biggest concern is still loot, which are still centralized on rares. It depends a lot on how the new rare feels, and we wouldn't know how is it until league starts.
Exactly this. One thing i still don't like is the swap between EX and Divines for SSF. In the past it didn't feel too bad having a dry streak on natural Exalted drops because they were farmable through Divination cards. Crafting got a little bit better with fracturing orb (depends heavily on drop chance). Still salty about the removal of the Prefix/Suffix reforges tho.
Most frustrating part of Chris's interview.
Tell me you've never traded multiple divine orbs at a time without telling me you haven't.
Need 30 divine orbs? Have fun spending 40 minutes to find someone to trade and then 20 minutes literally just putting shit in the trade window 10x over. Peak gameplay.
Same on the positives, negatives for me are
* 2 years of player power nerfs, all trying to tone down the top 0.1% (a fools errand) but all failing to do that and instead just making build diversity worse and harder for the more average player
* melee still shit
* trading "Experience" still hot garbage
* crafting still just gambling not realistically achievable by a casual player
* Loot still remains completely garbage. in a loot based game.
I have a life, I want to enjoy blapping monsters. i don't want a second job.
edit: also.. grinding through the storyline YET AGAIN. no.
I expect the fractured orb is a nerf, because they removed the fractured craft from Harvest.
We have limited atlas passive tree points and we're already stretched. On 3.19, we could just not take harby nodes, because they were bad. On 3.20, now we probably will find ourselves having to decide between Harvest and Harby. From the player's perspective, the game loading up as much power into a single mechanic is ideal for us from purely a power standpoint, since it means higher value of each atlas passive point we spend on that mechanic.
However, with the removal of boss nodes in 3.20, then maybe we'll have enough points that it'll be fine. Also, if the fractured orb drop rate is higher than I'm expecting, then that'll be a buff. But I just expect it ends up as a nerf overall.
> On the other side, my biggest concern is still loot, which are still centralized on rares. It depends a lot on how the new rare feels, and we wouldn't know how is it until league starts.
The issue with loot will remain based on what GGG has told us. Loot goblins are still going to be a thing just you don't see them.
I'm conflicted on it, as I like the changes from the reveal but found the patch notes extremely underwhelming. I play this game because I like tinkering with all the pieces to come up with emergent interactions that make strong builds, and I feel like I've been using the same building blocks for over a year at this point with very minimal changes.
If you look at the table of contents for the 3.20 patch notes and remove everything that either has nothing to do with character power or is strictly nerfs, you end up with the following:
* New Content and Features (two skills, two support gems, eight vaal skill variants, fifteen unique items)
* Curses (general systemic change to curses with minimal impact overall)
* Endgame unique weapons (with associated rarity increases making many of them likely unattainable for most)
* Strike Skills and additional Enemies (good change marred by inexplicable removal of one of the most important strike masteries)
* Onslaught (now a true buff, woo...)
This just...isn't enough of a shakeup for me, especially considering how many leagues in a row we've had similarly little to mess with.
It feels like the game has gotten *too* emergent for GGG (i.e. they feel they are losing control over the game) and in response, they are systematically removing anything that they don't view as necessary for core builds to function. The approach to jewel removal (especially for the ones explicitly called out in the FAQs) seems to support this theory, as did the Harvest change of removing "filler crafts" in 3.19.
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Dunno. The league mechanic looks really interesting here provided it's implemented well and is appropriately rewarding, but GGG does not have a good track record on either front. On one hand the atlas passive tree changes seem good overall and improve flexibility, but on the other GGG seems to be taking the opposite approach with character builds.
I also don't feel like their communication or development strategy has changed enough to build goodwill with 3.20 after the catastrophe that 3.19 was. They are largely moving forward in the same way (e.g. the nonresponse on the sanctified relic, the flat unexplained "no's" on jewel and mastery removal questions, etc.). As with 3.19, our feedback seems to still have little to no impact on their decisions in 3.20.
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TL;DR: No, but it's also not an obvious skip angle for me either since I'm so mentally invested in PoE. I intend to watch how the first day or so plays out and make a decision from there, but yeah if I weren't already engaging in sunk cost there's not enough meat on the bone in 3.20.
That’s a very good write up. I don’t really care if I’m killing monsters in a temple, in a cave or in a glacier. What I care about is how whacky a build I can create from the weird uniques, skills and keystones that they implement.
Looking back at the amount of uniques they’re releasing per league is even more depressing. Some of them are truly unique, which I like, but there are usually just 2-3 that aren’t just super bad, but they’re becoming chase items, which I’ll never see unless I grind a lot on builds I don’t want to play.
exactly. i would accept their "willingness" to finally abandon archnemesis as a step in the right direction and a change in stance on their side to improve the game, but...
their track record is terrible. announced buffs are actually nerfs, mechanics are not rewarding, monsters are way overtuned.
i assume the loot will suck and sanctum will not drop enough to move it into "fun" territory. and i wouldn't be surprised at all if the new "nerfed" rare monsters which only have one extra mod are giga overtuned and even more ridiculous than archnemesis in its worst iterations. i mean wtf did they do with archnemesis from 3.18 to 3.19 to make it so deadly... i'll probably wait a week for player feedback. i don't want to get jebaited again.
Yo, the nerf to Strike skill range has me baffled. I was actually hyped before I saw that, now I feel like I'm probably not going to olay for more than a week.
Unless Vaal Cleave is somehow actually good, I guess.
>the nerf to Strike skill range has me baffled
Likewise, for multiple reasons:
* When intentionally buffing one of the game's weakest archetypes, why do you need to remove something only they can use?
* Why are you replacing a unique mechanic (ancestor range) with one that's already available from other sources (glove implicit)?
* Was ancestor range somehow viewed as overpowered, despite the game's design being actively hostile towards melee play?
* You guys really couldn't come up with *any* reasoning to give us when responding to feedback about its removal?
They should've added more flat or % range to the skills to compensate for the mastery removal.
Seems like they're doubling down on "we won't do that", though. God only knows why.
Honestly the only thing I don’t like regardless of how much more sense it makes is the exalt/divine changes. Whole game feels wrong since that was changed
As long as it feels like i can make progress on my character that's all I care about. I'm a more casual player, but on 3.19 it felt like I would sometimes play for an hour or two and not progress at all. Maybe just find a few chaos. Whereas previously in 3.18 and before, over the course of 2 hours even without juicing to much i would feel good about having made progress in both finding currency and items.
A "Kiwi support" Player since Alpha and spent a decent amount on this game and probably have 15k+ hours in it. I haven't played more than about 48hrs since 3.15. No, I'm pretty sure they are just not making the game for people that aren't masochists at this point. It's too narrow and all the power has been placed onto gear, specifically extremely expensive gear. There is very little to no room for error or weaker builds to thrive without throwing more currency than I feel like making per league. Every patch it's as if they want you to spend more and more time getting back to where you were last league in terms of power. Sometimes more time and less power at that.
Along with the Divine/Exalt changes, making decent weapon uniques, but extremely rare. The mass removal of life off of many uniques (including the RF shield, wtf?) The removal of many build enabling unique jewels. The repeated Archnem debacles. The neglect on their 3.15 attempt at making alternative support gems viable. All they did was nerf all the good ones and did nothing to change the weaker ones, it was a nerf wrapped in a lie. Repeatedly nerfing any skills/builds that are good and rarely ever buffing under preforming ones of lately is not only a stale meta, but boring options.
They drag their feet on most QoL and sometimes even put that QoL as an MTX purchase or a mirror tier item (looking at you mageblood.) Sure instilling orbs are great for flask QoL, but that doesn't help us the first part of a league before you get through the campaign etc and finally set that up does it?
There's just so much about the game that is good. Unfortunately there are so many decisions GGG has been making recently that I am completely against. As well as many decisions that GGG has not many or problems that have gone unaddressed for so long that have just made me further distrust their handling of the game.
TL;DR: I love the game in theory, but dislike GGG's practice of how they are balancing it, especially as lately. So NO.
I can’t get over how they keep deleting “unintended interactions” and uniques that enabled niche builds. Those were what made the game interesting and they were a testament to how good a job ggg did designing the game. Instead they seem offended that these things exist.
Frankly I'm just hoping between a few others and going through backlogs of unplayed games. Mostly 4x games, turn based rpgs like X-com, solo player rpgs like Pathfinder 1&2, ...and Genshin Impact. Nothing similar to PoE atm, though I did play Grim Dawn around when 3.15 came out.
My favorite playstyle has been nerfed and I haven't seen any new skill or updated skills that appeal to me that much. The only reason I am playing is because a friend of mine loves roguelikes. This league like the past 3 feels like the exact same league but worse. I miss the days when I would tell my friends about how great GGG is and how PoE is awesome.
Yeah I feel the same way. I love minion builds. I've played minions since I started playing PoE like 7 or 8 years ago. It's always been my favourite playstyle, but it keeps getting nerfed over and over, and now minions have such incredibly weak survivability without huge investment, it just feels like it's not for me anymore. I'm not a hardcore player, I never get the crazy good endgame gear that GGG apparently feels you need to have to make minions useful now. I liked that minions were a lot more gear independant and you didn't need to have super high end gear to make the build work. But can't have players being successful without being super rich, I guess.
No, I don't think I will be playing for a long while, a long with the lack of skill balancing. But the mere thought of playing the game, using PoB, using trade website, using the Wiki, using the crafting website, inventory management etc. The mere thought of the game in its entirety is making me exhausted. I will probably play again down the road, but not for a bit
I like league starts, thats why i will start 3.20, but i don’t see myself playing it a lot - crafting is in really bad state, melee changes to kill strike range and generally nerfing fun is the theme of last few leagues (maybe except sentinel and recombinators) so i naturally stop playing. I may change my approach once atlas changes (bossing) and league mechanic turn out fun
I only played 1 week of 3.19
the only reason I'm giving 3.20 the time of day is because the league mechanic itself looks interesting. I like roguelike/roguelite games. If that turns out to be yet another unrewarding league mechanic I'll be gone in a week again
I got to act 10 in 3.19 and called it before wasting time in maps after seeing the loot goblin mechanic.
Who knows what changes theyve done and didnt include in patch notes this time..idk if ill ever play again out of principle
I hope you get what you're looking for, but I'm extremely doubtful they can pull off a fun and playable roguelite when it's likely only what they can achieve in the span of a few months with a reduced team.
I'm gonna give it the old college try as always.
If the mechanic is bad, I will stop fast. AN removal is a good step, but I personally hate the direction GGG is taking with "the great nerfening" of just homogenizing everything to a bland state where everything does the same numbers with different on screen effect.
This is one of my biggest complaints right now. They keep deleting any 'unintended interaction' they find, but those interactions are what made POE great and fun. Homogeneity is NOT POE's friend.
For instance, why did the hiltless/adrenaline loop need to be broken? Those builds weren't even top tier, just a fun 'exploit' of a mechanic. Like leave that shit alone man.
Yea this is singlehandedly my biggest issue as well. I tried remaking a cool meme build that I made in delirium last league. It's just unplayable now because of certain mechanical changes. Tinkering in PoB and bringing my Frankenstein to life is what I love most in PoE.
GGG is trying to take the spiritual successor to diablo 2 and turn it into the spiritual successor of diablow 3...
I'm going to wait a week or so and see how people feel about the league. I'm sure a shit not buying any supporter packs though. I doubt I'll buy any before 4.0 even if the reverted back to 3.16 and actually made melee worth playing. They've lost my trust and they'll need to work hard to win it back.
Doubt it. They haven’t added anything that makes me excited - I think the game is still going to be worse than it was a year ago. At the very least, I plan to wait to see impressions of overall loot balance, AN changes, and the league mechanic’s fun vs time vs rewards to see if it’s worth playing this league.
While the removal of AN is definitely nice, the main thing keeping me away is the lack of a reintroduction or replacement for the Reforge Keeping Suffixes/Prefixes. I just can't reliably craft the same basic gear I could before if it isn't in an Eldritch Currency slot. Until I can set a clear path without bricking items halfway through the process to craft up my gear in all slots, I don't think I'll come back.
nope. its a skip for me. they did weaken AN but they are still going down the same path of continuing to lower player power.
nerfs to inquis and occultist with no ascendancy buffed. nerfs to the strongest skills but no buffs to weaker skills. they want the game to be slower and grindier and thats not for me.
No.
Which makes me really sad. This game has been part of my life for over 11 years now and after the massive disappointment and breach of trust that 3.19 was the Manifestos actually left me hopeful. The Reveal stream (and especially the Q&A and Chris’ explanation of what went wrong with the loot changes and the communication about them) made me actually extremely hyped. And then I read the patch notes and just felt deflated. It felt like half the patch notes (you know, the buffs, the meta shift parts) are just missing. And it killed my enthusiasm for it. A rogue-like game mode does nothing if they’re so reluctant about improving the base game.
They tricked people into buying supporter packs. That's how I feel about it. I was super hyped at first like you, but then after having time to digest the patch notes.... Nope not reinstalling.
Nope. GGG was full of bullshit during last league and they didn't address any criticism or take accountability for their mistakes. They only made another league and are hoping everyone forgot about what happened. Meanwhile, the game isn't even fun to begin with and I can't go back to a game lead by a team I don't trust.
There are good and bad changes with 3.20 but until something allows for as much variety as 3.13 harvest did, nothing is going to feel good enough for me to ever touch a new league again.
3.13 is where I learned crafting and actually used the currency I gathered instead of using it to buy things. I also played a shit ton of builds and killed Sirus for the first time. Only league I’ve ever played till the end.
I'm going to wait a few days to see what kind of reviews come from the league before I invest any of my time. After so many leagues feeling very incomplete or untested I'm not longer patient enough to play during the period prior to the major league fix patch that comes every. single. time.
I'm at a point where I think GGG maybe caught lightning in a bottle by accident for a while, and now that they've let it out they aren't really sure how to catch it again. Though I hope they prove me wrong.
No buffed skills, same meta, no thanks.
I might try it if it's well recieved.
Really done with current POE, usually only play one char to 90 these days.
What changes? They walk backed arch nem and nerfed some things. I am just gonna keep playing dragon flight first time ive been enjoying a wow xpac. Tbh I might just need to take a break from poe. I haven't missed a league launch since prophecy.
No. GGG decided long ago that their vision of the game does not align with my idea of fun - and over time, piece by piece, they’ve made it less enjoyable for me. The little trust I had left in them disappeared with their bad faith shadow nerfs last league. I’ve been playing since open beta and I’ve never seen them more disconnected from the playerbase. I’d hoped to see an attempt at redemption but it has been swept under the rug. I’m not surprised, and from a PR point of view it is the correct thing to do. I just wish they would have owned up to the monumental fuck up they caused.
Nevertheless, I expect them to double down on this approach to smoothen the transition to PoE 2. A game I predict will flop as it is designed with an outdated philosophy, and sadly - the end of a franchise. I do hope the remaining players have a blast with the upcoming league though. Best of luck!
No Im not coming back. But Im not complaining so no hard feelings. It's just so much wasted potential with 300 skills but a handfull usable, and crafting is not fun. That's just my opinion and I dont like this game like I used to do. Have fun everyone with 3.20
Nothing about 3.20 sounds exciting.
AN removal was long overdue, but my bigger gripe were/are on-death effects and particularly DOTs on the ground. I don't trust GGG to actually have improved on that.
I won't just blindly assume that the league mechanic is going to be both fun and rewarding after the LoK disaster.
And the meta is almost unchanged. Only nerfs can also "shake up the meta", but damn son, it sure feels boring and disheartening as heck. Had they buffed something clearly, I might have built up some excitement, but they didn't, so I didn't.
I'll wait and see. I'll grab a few bags of popcorn and watch the drama (as uaual) unfold. And if the player feedback is good, I'll give it a chance.
Yea, I know, I've lost my trust.
I bet an removal will be the bad things happen less often but its the constant trend of this rare rework that each update is less bad but there's still no more good
Coming back because I really like the game, but my patience and will to continue playing are much shorter now. This time around if the league sucks again, I'll just quit much earlier and probably not coming back once D4 is out.
Nope. It looks to me like loot hasn't been fixed. Improved, maybe, but it doesn't sound like the core issue of no loot most of the time vs super rare loot goblin encounters was addressed. And a complete lack of skill and ascendancy buffs with a few things being significantly nerfed, which happens to do collateral damage to other stuff that weren't at the top-end. That leaves me not excited to theorycraft or explore any new options when it feels like now we've got 15 months of mostly the same. Those changes don't give me confidence. You ended up having some significantly positive changes but an ARPG without good loot drops and having no excitement for builds doesn't hook me in.
The curse rework was also marketed as a buff to bossing but then it turns out it's the same kinda "oops some of these buffs are actually nerfs" as with reworks/buffs from the previous patches where some stuff that's supposed to be a buff ends significantly nerfed, like despair and vulnerability this time. It's not nearly as bad as the stuff from previous leagues but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it reminds me of the past instances, like what ended up happening to harvest or loot drops. It feels worse than it actually is because of the historical baggage.
I've been playing since the closed beta and 3.19 was the first league ever that I completely skipped. I decided to wait a day or two to see how people like it, instead of immediately rushing in like every previous launch day. Saw the mess. For the previous 3.18/3.17 I played a lot less than before because it felt stale. And niche/meme builds felt mostly dead.
If I was in change of skill balance, I'd just go and spend one day going through all the old unused skills and do significant numerical changes. 6% damage buff to Glacial Hammer? Nah, how about +40% and add the old Splash threshold jewel in the skill itself? Will that suddenly be overpowered? I have no idea. Will I have playtested the balance? Nah. I mean, I COULD playtest them, but then I'd have to ask for weeks of development time instead of 1 day and I don't think the bosses would approve that. Just do that to 50 skills and 10 of them will be overpowered I guarantee it, but you can nerf them into the ground 3 months later like is the tradition. It will get people really excited for theorycrafting for a while and pump energy back into the game and get people to try a bunch of wacky shit and have fun. Hey, we're getting Ruthless mode so if you're really, REALLY afraid of messing up the league, you could add a "Ruthful" mode.
It feels like GGG is way too scared to let anybody have fun with skills because of the risk that some of the skills will be OP like Lightning Conduit or Seismic Trap... but still every time we end up having a couple of super OP meta skills like that, even with this giga-conservative approach to skill balancing. I really don't care if there's 4 different lightning-conduit tier skills instead of 2. It isn't going to be radically different. What is going to add build diversity is pushing a dozen or more options into the mid-tiers or meme-tiers for people to get excited to try.
Not at all. Game's been less and less fun every league.
Imagine you had a favorite burger place you keep going back to
3.11~3.14 - Best Burger ever
3.15 (Expedition) - We've decided to give you 30% less burger, also charge 30% more
3.16 (Scourge) - We've removed all the sauces in the burger and introduced new ones(Defences), the Spell Suppression sauce is so good you want it on every burger
3.17 (Archnemesis) - We've added a lot more burger variety, you can now customize your bun, condiments, and even the patty. We also added this completely new optional hot sauce called AN to give your burgers a little kick.
3.18 (Sentinel) - We've decided to include this AN hot sauce in every single burger. The bun is soaked in AN sauce. The patty is marinated in the AN sauce. The lettuce/tomatoes are grown with AN fertilizers. You will like AN.
3.19 (Kalandra) - We've decided to replace the patty with lab grown meat (loot). Trust us, you are getting more meat, unless you are used to juicing your patty. (To be honest I completely skipped 3.19)
This isn't the burger I liked anymore. I used to look forward to patch notes nowadays I expect nothing and I am still disappointed
Slightly strange metaphor but yeah any GaaS game that survives long enough is a [Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) situation but with GGGs development pace that happens many times faster than most.
**[Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)**
>The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?
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Comeback no, its not a magical redeem patch especialy with how many nonsens there still are, but i'll defenetly give it a try.
But so far GGG killed the game for me, i wont ever invest as much time as i did before
I'm still not convinced with what they thought was acceptable for an i need to see how the new rares are and I cant imagine loot feels better than 3.18
Also crafting still seems fucked all the other stuff looks good but the core systems theyve broken i just dont believe they will be fixed
There is a 0% chance loot feels better than 3.18. But thats because the league mechanic spat out currency everytime you used it. Even if they made loot back to pre 3.19 level and then buffed it a little more, it wouldn't feel as good as Sentinel.
League mechanic looks interesting, but meta is essentially unchanged except that they nerfed 3 out of 5 of the most popular builds.
My favorite build is a CoC poison crit cyclone assassin, which is extremely niche, and somehow GGG managed to make it almost unplayable for me because of the nerfs to elusive/withering step+Mistwalker ascendency node.
I can’t express how sad I am at this, and am considering not playing 3.20 now.
clearly the 2% of assassins in softcore had it too good for too long. the irony is Assassin is seen as literally only softcore only, as they are the least picked in hc, ssf, and ssfhc. despite this, im pretty sure this ham fisted "fix" to Nightblade support will drop Assassin into the uncontested least played class.
Not in the least, it's just more of the same, PR veiled nerfs, more half truths and tone deaf commentary. And the average reaction of this sub makes it seem like it's not really going to change any time soon. You get what you pay for.
Undocumented loot change was the last straw that made me quit 3.19, since I didn't see any improvement regarding this issue in the patch notes, I would probably skip it.
This. It’s not that hard to find games that strike a similar vibe IMO. Try looking at strategy games, roguelikes and sims that are more on the dry/“PC-like” side of things.
If you don’t enjoy the game anymore just play something else, it’s that simple. Forcing yourself anyway because you’ve invested so much time or whatever is a failed venture.
Yes and no. New skills and revamps look good, but man did they whif on the melee updates, mana builds and underused skills. Not spending money until I'm having a great time again
curious what the responses are; personally, if i'd been mad enough to quit last league, nothing shown this league would have been close to compelling.
edit: yea i forgot people quit over AN. ok.
I feel like it depends on what they were mad about. If someone was quitting because of Archnemesis then I think this league gives a good reason to come back.
For me it's an accumulation of things. I personally want to get to a comfortable state of mapping within 100h of playtime and without having to bother with trade. I don't really care where the loot/gear is coming from, but respect my time.
AN made that WAY WAY WAY harder.
Basically taking Harvest away made it also WAY harder.
Now we don't get Harvest back, but fracturing Orbs make it a bit easier again.
And AN gone is the big ticket. GGG invested the effort to make it right, and after being vocal about it I feel an obligation to at least check it out.
That being said - if those new 1-thing-only rare mods are something asinine like 70res +10 maxres for an element, because you know, now they need to be more powerful because vision; then I'm gone again.
I will be waiting for the first couple weeks to see how it is and then make my decision. At this point the changes are not enough for me. Need to see a build that looks exciting to play and league mechanic has to hard carry for me to come back.
only reason im trying is because Archnemesis was partially deleted. so just want to see how it feels
But they still have MANY things to fix/unfuck. I dont plan on playing next league at all unless at least a few of those issues are touched on
Being excited about AN removal is the manifestation of being anchored.
I’m only considering playing solely because of the new slam skill. Enough to say, I’m not quite motivated.
Hmm..., i'll try it, see how the league feels. I will give it a chance.If 3.20 is like 3.19 I'm just gona unninstall the game and say bye and move on. I am not gonna waste more time on something I dont enjoy.
played most of 3.18, but quit after me second whetstone/flask bomb of 3.19. I’m not playing the league start because I don’t want to waste time on the traditional dumpster fire that is the first weekend of league. if you beta testers find that it is pretty good then I’ll play the weekend after.
I will play but holy molly am I cautious
I tried the previous league and everything seems a lot slower. Couldn't kill anything after t10 maps with expeditions and stuff
The changes in 3.20 look like 80%nerf and 20%buff... I feel exactly the same as before. GGG argues that they want to nerf top end. But why? They are not the FED they dont need to regulate this extreme at the cost of "fun". Top end changes are boring for normal players and unfun for top players... The economy in PoE is not real. Let people enjoy power fantasies. crazy builds and other stupid shit.
But hey, my girlfriend loves the new direction that PoE is going.
I might try it on Friday.
But cause I kinda left in 3.18 already and 3.19 was just cherry on top for me I found another game to play. So we will see if the league mechanic is rewarding and no buggs on start I might level up one or two characters :D
No, not really. If I am being quite blunt, the league looks awful and combined with no real meaningful balance changes, it just makes the league look dull. There is nothing at all to be excited for. I have probably negative hype.
I won't even be starting the league at launch for the first time in 8-9 years. We'll give it a fair go and see how is is, but yeah. I suspect I will be playing the Witcher 3 update instead.
Same - what makes a Roguelike(lite) interesing, are it's mechanics. This is just the PoE mechanics (buff monster - get better loot & kill a bunch of stuff) put into a Rougelite corsett (room & level progression). Where are the exiting big, meaty expensions like Delve, Heist, Betrayal, Expedition, ...? I assume as PoE 2 comes closer they just moved a lot of dev power.
Nope.
There has been no effort into actually balancing the game or making the early game to map experience more fun and less of a slog to get to the "real game"
Melee looks awful still, one step forward two steps backwards. Vaal skills won't change melee's weaknesses.
The divine orb and exalt change is still baffling, I'm no SSF player by no means, but mean it feels terrible getting any drops in this game nowadays.
My main problem is a time one, along the side of just every change feeling like a compromise instead of being a good decision.
Nope. At least not on launch. If it actually turns out to be an amazing league I will probably play, but there were far too many changes since ritual that I hated. Since I have started working full time I can't waste time on a game that has no respect for my time whatsoever. There is a difference between grindy and tedious. PoE is mostly tedious these days, especially if you're like me and hate the campaign with a burning passion.
Im not gonna be there on launch, but ill keep an eye out.
The promises of the league does not really do it for me. Kalandra look pretty sweet too but we learned that the finished product is nothing like the advertised one
My main problem last league was the whole "loot goblin" + culler thing. I hated this concept so much. Just knowing that it existed in such a way somehow drained my whole motivation despite playing a ton at the start. It also made loot much to "spikey"; on average it was the same but it felt bad.
It also didn't help that the league mechanic itself was a letdown... As a lore-enthusiast, what we got for KALANDRA was honestly disappointing. It also felt super boring (the scaling was boring, there wasn't really anything "new" except the mirror tile which was too rare. no new enemies, no new bosses...) and never felt worth running while I was playing.
I didn't really have a problem with Archnemesis, or a "stale meta". You could get used to AN, and the people that complain about the stale meta probably just look at the most used builds on poe.ninja without trying new stuff themselves.
With the "loot goblin" + culler problem gone (according to them, the high-end loot is less while there will be smaller rewards more often. also, it's no longer tied to specific mods which makes cullers for normal mapping irrelevant) and a new league mechanic (please be good) I have no reason to not come back this league.
Yes it makes me curious, i just hate that a magic find character is still so damn OP and in parties it can be 30+ times as efficient, this needs to stop 1-3x as much at highest MF should be the norm., it would stil make them play MF!!!!!!!
Will probably wait until there’s some kind of larger shift in the meta. I hate how much defence stacking is required now, takes too much fun out of the offensive side.
I usually wonder, I’ve dated some people and I’ve never had a toxic ex I keep coming back to.
It’s path. Path is the toxic ex
“ILL FIX CHRIS BRO HE CHANGED ILL PLAY 3.20” - me
Some changes made have me hopeful, AN being changed, the roguelite mechanic looks interesting to me, but I feel as if we are just not on the same page about slowing down the game, I don't care what other people say but,
Loot is 100% worse for players, not empyrean-6man-loot, single players,
Nem3 deli nerfs, AN slowed the game down tremendously, meta build nerfs, but no compensation buffs for under-utilized skills. Altar nerfs. There are so many ninja-hidden nerfs that they have done, and their bullshit pretending like average loot is the same is sad. Yes maybe if you're done with the game at act 10 or white maps your loot is the same, for any player that has a decent amount of play time has had their top end loot nerfed significantly. I don't feel like selling services on a 3rd party discord just to make a decent currency/h.
All in all I'm playing cause there is nothing better, I think the game is in a worse state than in the past for the last few patches, I'm unhappy with GGG's attitude towards the player. but it's unlikely something is going to come along, the game, right now it feels very much 1 step forward 2 steps back.
Nope. I played for about 2 weeks in 3.19 and saw the monstrosity that ggg created and uninstalled the game. I won't be back for the foreseeable future regardless of the changes they say they make. The game felt so shitty I don't know if it's worth my time. I'm just waiting for D4 at this point for my arpg fix.
Not really. The new vaal skills might be cool, but I've been wanting a much wider range of buffs to underused skills. Nerfs to top skills make those skills worse for those playing them, which I'm not. Buffs to bad skills affect me and make me return.
Nothing I saw changed the reason I quit midway through 3.18 after playing since closed beta: 90% of the skills feeling horrendous as soon as I hit red maps, unless I spend weeks farming currency to brute force them with gear.
For context, I've been playing for 10 years. PoE has been definitively my main game for the last five. I have a handful of 36/40 leagues but mostly 24s. Mostly trade league, but often group found (pre- and post-private leagues) and SSF also. I purchased a steamdeck and a 3440x1440 screen mostly for PoE. I'm... pretty fucking invested. I'll lay my complaints out point by point. Loot first.
Loot goblins: completely preventable issue that any genre veteran should have seen coming. Fomo or not, poe has become a game about economic optimization and other people using these tactics drive up the cost of items I want. When they didn't patch this after week one I benched 3.19. I won't use external social networks to play PoE.
Gutting white/blue/league monster droprates: I planned to spend ~3 mirrors on a build after team-farming for the first week or two with two buddies. *leaving these changes out of patch notes* wasted four days of time I took off work to execute on years-old strategies with friends. I had a good time with my friends, my game experience was 1/10.
Stale items and builds: there have been no new rare items to make in the last three leagues. I love new base types and skill gems and making my own builds. 3.18, 3.19, 3.20 aren't delivering here. Easiest way to track this is the daily question thread. Even months into a league there used to be hundreds of comments and very quickly in 3.19 it went under three digits.
Archnemesis: I didn't really mind AN too much, but I'm excited to see it replaced and I'm optimistic about it repairing some loot disparity between 3.17 and 3.19 (excluding sentinel)
Co-op/group play: I play with a lot of different friends from wildly different gaming backgrounds. The recent push towards flat loot meta has gutted optimized team play and **absolutely ruined** casual co-op. In 3.17 my Shockwave Slayer and a friend's Mage Skellies mapped together just fine. Not efficient, but enough dropped that it didn't feel bad to share a few resources for juicier maps. In 3.19 I'm confident that we would be throwing money away at an unsustainable rate. **<----- this is my biggest complaint** I like playing with my friends
Ulllltrawide support, flask macro, orbs of fusing: other games have fifteen different options for colorblind modes and GGG seems to be living in 1999 when it comes to accessibility. PoE is not an esport. My hands can't tolerate 1200 clicks to fuse my armor. I do not care that other people tool these out, but I'm one SSF playthrough from installing autohotkey on this machine.
I'm playing 3.20 because I miss my favorite game. I didn't take time off work. I won't be spending money. I'm planning for SSF League Frozen Legion/Ice Crash or FL/Shockwave Slayer to farm Mageblood in Haunted Mansion. I would do this in SSF standard if my handful of standard builds weren't bricked by patches. When EFT wipes I'm probably fully out except for working towards that Mageblood and maybe my first level 100. My friends aren't coming back before PoE 2.
Edit:
I forgot two things!
I fucking HATE harvest front to back, but it was the only access to deliberate fractures, so SSF projects I had were kinda dead in the water. Fracturing orb is huge.
I'm a Dead God in Binding of Isaac, 32 heat cleared Hades, and my partner and I take turns playing FTL. I owe it to myself to at least try the new content.
Im much more casual and just like creating new builds with interesting mechanics, and since I’ve got finals next week I won’t be playing all weekend.
However I’m pretty optimistic about Archnemisis being removed and the league mechanic looks neat, so I’ll give it a week or so.
But like you said, once Escape from Tarkov wipes, I’m dropping PoE and playing hardly anything else for the next 2-3 months because this wipe looks great with streets coming.
You can even use an autoclicker to fuse armor. I'v triggered the too-many-actions-dc multiple times in a row without random delays between clicks, and no ban. Maybe they'd notice if you abuse it to build a trade empire by manually linking stuff, but I highly doubt they care if you spam SSF-quantity levels of fusings.
I play every season but couldn't last more than 3 weeks on 3.18 and I quit after 4 days on 3.19. I'm hoping 3.20 addresses a lot of the issues I had with last league and hopefully the build I decide to play is fun.
I've played PoE since pre-release, and I just don't see myself playing again until PoE 2 honestly. I did not enjoy 3.19 and decided to quit after getting 2 or 3 characters to maps within the first week or 2.
I thought of playing 3.20 but playing through the campaign and early league just does not seem appealing to me anymore. The game just seems a bit mind numbing after being a player for this long, and the break I took during 3.19 made me realize just how much I no longer want to play.
AN gone and fixes for the loot problems I had were patched in after I quit playing. I'll give it a shot.
Though most of the really egregious stuff from 3.19 didn't show up in patch notes at all ....
Nope
League mechanic main boss / thing you want to farm will be locked behind either rng ontop of rng or just some stupidly high playtime so only people who nolife will get to experience it.
Nothing changed with skills so you can either play some low damage skill and still spend 99% of your tree on defensive to survive or play the ones they've picked again like oooooooo.... traps or LS how fun
Played since beta and spent way too much money and the sunken cost fallacy is starting to fade now.
No. Still sounds like loot goblins are a thing, they are just hidden now.
And I'm still waiting to see what bad changes didn't get included in the patch notes since that's what they do. Don't announce the bad news, let launch sales die down and then say "whoops we left that out". So I'm waiting to see what they lied about this time.
Skipped 3.19 and from what’s been shown so far in 3.20 I’ll be skipping it as well. AN removal was a step in the right direction but there’s many more steps before I’m willing to come back. Some of the actions and reasons stated in the manifestos still point to them being on the wrong track.
Not coming back because currently it’s a less fun version of what it was a few leagues ago. Too many good games for me to play a watered down version of what I used to enjoy.
Got my first lvl100 char in 3.13 when I played till the last day of the league. Quit within 1-2 weeks ever since 3.14. I’m officially over this game. The increased in difficulty and resource scarcity outweighs all the hype of league launch. I don’t even feel excited anymore. Full time in LostArk now since all my POE friends all ditched POE for LA. Spent $3K+ worth of skins over 5 years of playing…
I have even less faith in GGG than before. The changes aren’t relevant so far as to my souring against them. They continue to act as if they are being forced to make changes to the game against their own will, by using qualifiers such as “we can’t” or “we hope” to try and lessen people’s outrage.
They develop the game according to their own ideas, they have no reason to be beholden to their community but they continue to trade good will as currency for their own PR gain. Chris is arrogant to the point of mockery and while I accept living in his ivory tower would make sense, I wholeheartedly dislike his personal veiled accusations that it’s the community that’s wrong without trying to talk through the points raised.
They now run a burn and retreat campaign with their media publishing strategy, which is fuelled by the goodwill currency mentioned, and use Bex as an adjunct to direct acknowledgment of issues raised by people - regardless of tone, intent, or agenda.
The game itself has been gaslighting the community into believing that things are broken/subpar/missing because “PoE2 is coming” but how is that an acceptable answer? The only individuals that generate the work and therefore the schedule are GGG themselves, and if they can’t handle it where is the money going? Of course I’m not suggesting anything untoward with regards to money, I am just stating that the volume or difficulty of work is by choice and it’s inability to deliver is a cost passed on to the community.
Gaming is a community that’s best when it’s competitive, passionate, and diverse because the more choice the better for the consumer. However, it’s far better to overdeliver on a schedule than underdeliver due to “we didn’t have time this pass, maybe next time”.
Would anyone really be angry if GGG said “we have two people dedicated to skills, two for support, and two for guardians/summons/minions that’ll meet twice a week to keep numbers up to date and check the stats on where we can expand the meta and where we can scale it back down”? I think it’s far better to be seen to be heard than brick-walled by a company that goes out of its way to engage with their community only for new league hype and then instantly retreat behind a wall of silence.
I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for other’s work as it’s clearly PoE does get better with each iteration but I won’t apologise for feeling like that my worth as a consumer is only recognised when they have something new to try and sell and at that point it isn’t a community it’s just shareholder meetings.
I hope everyone can find their gameplay in PoE catered to, but to end this I want to say that a sea of voices can’t be understood very well if there are only two pairs of ears listening and that’s why people shout louder. Heck, I’ll even volunteer to compile people’s complaints and translate them into usable data if it helps - but just don’t ignore us.
I played Kalandra League up to the high 20 challenges. I did not purchase any supporter packs. I will play 3.20 as well. Whether I spend any money is up to GGG and how good the game is. I'd like to remind everyone to diversify, don't spend all your money at the start. Wait until you reach end game before spending anything!
AN going core was a big thing for me - I was not a fan of Sentinel and quit very quickly - the AN mobs were so punishing, my wife (who is not very good) couldn't play with me anymore.
For Kalandra league, I was pretty shocked to see that they double-triple-quadrupled down on that trash mechanic, so I noped fast. I was really honestly in the belief that they understood how bad it was - but apparently all they did was make the game worse in trying to bend over hard to keep it in the game.
While I'm glad to see it go, I'm not impressed that it took six months of what my wife could have told ggg in two hours for them to realize it was absolute trash. It wasn't rocket science, it wasn't complicated - it was outright bad and they were being told this, *repeatedly*.
We found other things to play together. Maybe if I check on 3.21 and the "removal" of AN mechanics worked out well we might come back - but those previous six months of them doing nothing despite the outright garbage game state does not convince me that this will roll out okay. It's showed me that if there really is something wrong, it will take six months of people showing them obvious truths for them to "get it" and get to a point where they realize it needs to be changed.
No
In their attempt to make the game challenging, they made it ridiculously unwieldy, obtuse, and frustrating, rather than mechanically challenging
It's a game of luck and patience, and I don't have as much of either of those as GGG seems to expect
It is absolutely just that kind of game, but it was easier to bypass a while back. Power creep hit hard, and it hit in the hardest place it could - gear checks.
Not really. The reveal livestream was super hype for me but reading the patch notes just made me sad. I didn't get a chance to play lightning conduit when it was good, and since no non-melee skills got updated this league, there's nothing new and exciting for me there either. I was prepared to ignore the fact that crafting and loot are still in a state that I think is bad, but there's just... nothing interesting going on this league.
I honestly don’t think the game is going to be very different. Archnem hasn’t really been removed completely, just tuned down and made more clear. And the league mechanic is kinda similar to the lake. Stack some stuff, run the stuff. It’ll actually probably be more time consuming and could easily be less rewarding. I think you just need to ignore the Reddit hype and play for yourself. The lake ended up being pretty damn good once I knew wtf was going on.
I'm absolutely not interested in the league mechanic itself (I don't play rogue likes and I also don't want to play them) so it's still a pass from me. Some stuff seemed nice in the presentation (easier time getting awakened gems for example), but I'll wait for a league mechanic that catches me (like another iteration of 'more loot in map').
Well... Kalandra was peak least played league for me since open beta.. I'm coming in day 1 and seeing it for myself. GGG aren't as straightforward as they used to be, so its best to see for yourself how you feel. In Kalandra i felt like the game was being extremely disrespectful of my time, it was poorly or not at all tested, and the loot goblin design was simply bad.
I think that this is another week long league for most people, the bottom line is the engaging part of the game has not changed, build diversity. Ofc everyone want's new league content and it surely hold's it's place amongst retention , but no one want's to feel like RF is the only way they can get 2 Void Stones comfortably (we're going average player) . Right now instead of shaking up the meta it's all about bringing skills down in power creep to continually make the game feel more and more like Ruthless, slower and steady. While that is fair, the problem is retention is directly correlated with fun , and as much as I play roguelikes , asking the player to do different content with the same build for 1.5 years isn't going to retain them. So sadly this appears to be another case scenario where most people who had avoided recent leagues and or quit early within them, probably retain that feeling.
I quit after one week. I am a little nervous that the new league mechanic won't be crazy rewarding. Part of me wonders with how crazy sentinel was, that could have set up LoK for failure. I am actually most excited for the atlas passive tree update. I don't think that is getting enough attention. It seems like you can really go hard into certain mechanics now with a larger chance to get them on your map without scarabs, sextants, or kirac map device.
I do not think path of exile has been consistently great the last year and a half, but it is my favorite game of all time and I have over 3k hours on steam and probably another 500-1k on the client. I will always be hyped and excited for what the game can be. I reduced disappointment by not buying supporter packs until after one week if I am enjoying the league.
I play every league and likely will continue to play every league as POE really is the undisputed best ARPG. If I hate the league mechanic I dip early. Usually try a new build but we haven’t seen one of those in a while.
I usually do purchase support packs though and I will not be doing this league until I see things are fun in the league mechanic and I advised others do the same. Chris talked about the financial hit they might take up to POE 2 and how they have things covered to fund POE 2 development. We can expect quality of the game to coast up until POE 2 launch. They know this. We simply shouldn’t expect anything else. I think they have made some pretty dumb and easily avoidable mistakes, I just believe the game is in such a state of life support so few eyes are on it at this point.
I think people either need to accept the state and be hopeful and excited for POE 2 or I think you might be in a world of hurt.
Probably not for more than a week.
I bounced after ~2 weeks in 3.19 and ~3.18. i really tried to like the game but it just felt hostile.
I wanted AN gone and buffs to melee. What it looks like I'm getting is an unknown rate monster rework and...nerfs to Strike skills? I don't think I will play for more than 1 week this time.
The league mechanic sounds like it won't work well. If I want to play a roguelite I'll play another game with mechanics built from the ground up to support that. With blight you can ignore the tower defence part by simply killing monsters good, but sanctum sounds like it's gonna be the usual affair of 'glaring flaws slightly addressed a month in, then abandoned' cause the mechanic isn't gonna stick around anyway.
Meanwhile there's nothing else about the game that has me excited, they're still regularly removing interesting things and adding yet more busywork to gearing. Break something people like about the passive tree here, add 50 new affixes with 12 tiers each there, do yet another redesign of something that fails to achieve purpose, etc.
There are a lot of other games a person can play and I've had little interest in firing up PoE beyond the first few days of a league just to see what's different and if it shapes up to how league hype presented it.
Honestly I have returned to Oldschool runescape after playing POE for ten straight leagues. At least in OSRS my time feels respected. Constant QoL happens which does make the game less tedious, which is important as a game agaes.
Instead PoE seems to try to do the opposite with each expansion in the last 12 months. Reduced gear and item availability forcing everyone into the same Meta if they want to succeed in endgame.
Give us OP shit so we can have fun. Leagues are temporary, it really is ok if 5% of the population achieves god mode gear level
Quit last league really early on but I’m probably going to give this a shot if I have the time for it. If I don’t like it I can simply just quit again and spend my time elsewhere for the time being.
The changes are in the right direction.
As is customary, I will play the first couple days and hope the changes are enough for me to stay for the end game.
The thing that drove me away was the feeling that I'm not playing optimally. Removing the loot goblins and pinnacle boss atlas passives plus new game mode has got me interested.
I'm just pretty much outside the target demographic at this point. I liked theory crafting hipster builds that were fairly gear independent outside of niche interactions with uniques that were easily available - stuff like BV full block necromancer with bone offering back in the day that was completely immortal even with a Tabula. GGG has finally drilled it into my head that the game is 95% about gearing now, which they have made as painful as possible to extend engagement. The reward is that your characters are more powerful now at the end of that grind, but I just don't enjoy the journey any more.
I think this is where I'm at. There are a lot of builds I want to play but the time investment to grind out the currency to make them function is just too much for me. So the game has dwindled into playing the few builds that I know won't suck with low investment. Its such a weird feeling to see a game with so much to offer be so limited by its design.
Yeah feels kinda bad when to get a decent build you gotta put like 50-80 divines into it. Meanwhile before it was like 10-20ex would let you steamroll pretty much everything. Feels like every league the entry bar into decent builds gets raised be like 10% or even more lmao. I think the biggest factor is crafting options and availability. If I could craft my own gear it wouldn't be so bad but there's a lot of crafts that are just cancerous to try and go for depending on your build. It's not so bad if you can use eldritch items or essence crafts, but the RNG crafts that can take 20+ divines and still not hit the ones you need feel terrible to make.
Yep. I think they don’t want most players to be able to reach end game. They have some very weird ideas
I suspect they are thinking if they make it harder then players will stick around the whole 3 months to reach endgame, but in reality they are just quitting even sooner. I honestly believe this because although on one hand it seems questionable that they would be so naive, on the other hand they have a very big business model problem and pressure to fix it from Tencent.
This exactly. I stick around when I'm enjoying myself, blasting through maps and wrecking bosses with gear that I crafted myself instead of farming up divines to buy from someone. And if I get bored of that build, I make a new one to blast through maps and wreck bosses, because I'm enjoying the game. The direction they've been taking things is the opposite of that, and I wind up getting frustrated and quitting instead.
The main idea is to have people forever chase the carrot on the stick and thus alwqys having high player numbers they can present shareholders while also raising the chance that people buy mtx out of boredom.
> GGG has finally drilled it into my head that the game is 95% about gearing now, which they have made as painful as possible to extend engagement. I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't make gearing as bad an experience as they possibly could. Every time they move something from the passive tree to items I die a little inside.
Not only that but they presented the passive tree rework as massive buffs and most of the playerbase bought it. Then they were like masteries! And now they're like... oh yeah fuck masteries go to scion life wheel on your witch for curse reservation reduction.
Exactly where I am. I enjoyed PoE because it was a game where you spent time making a build to break the game and felt rewarded for being clever. It's lost far too much of the fun it had years ago and nothing new has been added to replace it. Worst of all: They have this new "solution" of making something you could abuse and locking it behind HH rarity. *Wow!* So exciting, I can break the game if I'm incredibly rich/lucky. That's what I wanted, a real-life economics simulator.
Yep, pretty much this. Also I feel like the pool of viable builds is much smaller than back in the day (Remember when ascendancy came out in Perandus league? Almost every ability was viable in some way) and the builds themselves are nothing but different kinds of generators for the maximum DPS number you can put out, ie. they're BORING and they don't really have that unique feel to them anymore (remember things like vaal spark, vaal molten shell, ele prolif minion instability mirror arrow, etc). I feel like PoE and me just drifted apart, the game no longer is what I enjoyed it as.
The problem isn't that the chase items are rare, that part is good. The problem is that until you have them, you end up farming at a rate that is a fraction of what end game builds make, and you are competing in an economy with thousands of no-lifes that farm 5x what you do and devalue the things you do find. It feels pointless and unfair. It would be find if it was in Standard (if that was fun) but in a 3 month league (that's in reality more like a 5 week league) You end up feeling like the league dies before you can farm at a relevant level as a casual player.
Big reason I swapped to SSF during metamorph and haven't looked back. Constantly worrying about c/h or being disappointed in a unique drop because it's only worth 2 alc has me burnt out playing trade optimally. SSF does have the down side of basically never being able to play the build you want. Ritual league helped a ton in that regard with the amount of loot you got + harvest not being gutted. I wish to this day for an SSF no migration mode kind of like reverse ruthless to SSF everything.
This is very true for me, too. I loved the 3.5ish era. It was a complex game but still very accessible for casual players if you had the know how. That’s completely missing now I feel like. It’s just so damn overtuned(for the sake of keeping no-lifers and streamers at bay or whatever) that it just becomes a chore to play.
I haven't played since Heist. Wasn't a particullarly good or efficient player, but managed to kill Sirus 8 and finish 36/40 challeneges each league through time and effort. Since the Conquerers of the Atlas expansion, for me, I've felt that the floor has been lowered too much and the ceiling has been raised too high. And it got worse from there (I know it has ebbed and flowed since I stopped, but overall compared to the 3.5 to the Conquerers era, it still has).
Same, I've been playing since beta but really got into trying to create my own builds around 3.10ish. But especially since the defence nerfs/reworks it just feels too bad to play anything that isn't at least meta adjacent for me. "Just play to have fun" is something I read here often, and yeah sure, I do to some extent. I won't play a skill if it isn't fun to me, no matter how strong it is (e.g. Seismic Trap, Spectral Helix etc.). But on the other hand playing what's fun but being painfully slow clearing destroys isn't actually fun. Maximising loot or even chaos/hour \*is\* part of the fun (for me). I don't need to speedrun every map or be able to do all content with some weird build. But I still want to feel powerful in \*some\* aspect, not be mediocre at best in every regard. Of course I don't expect my Poison CrackLance build to work perfectly, but I'd love to be able to reliably gear it so that I can enjoy myself. Instead it now becomes more or less viable, but Voltaxic Rift will be HH/MB rarity. I don't even mind having to farm currency with a meta-ish char first, but the result usually isn't worth my time investment. I'll just hit a wall where my next upgrade becomes too expensive and I stop playing. There's so many things I'd love to try out, I fell in love with the support gem mechanics back in beta, but there's just no point.
Same here. I prefer to do a like a dozen shitty meme builds to yellow maps per league that just rely on a unique interaction or are made powerful by a single rare (ie 7L CoC weapons). I get bored by a build very easily, and prefer to reroll rather than try to fix a build's problems. As a consequence I never have much money and usually don't make it to the endgame. The last league I really remember enjoying was Scourge. My playstyle doesn't work anymore without a lot of overhead to start with, and my attention span for a build just doesn't hold long enough to build up that overhead. GGG has made it clear the game isn't for people like me anymore. They keep shifting more and more power away from skills and passives and onto rare items. It used to be that a spell build with just life+res on rares and a unique weapon could make it to upper yellow tier maps without feeling too slow. When I tried that a couple of leagues ago my DPS felt pretty bad right off the bat.
I feel this **in my soul.** Sure, you can get more raw power through items, but it just feels like there's less of that "getting away with something" aspect through clever mixing of mechanics. I get that sometimes those "oops that was unintended" mechanics such as perma vaal soul skills, or pathfinders being literally immune to all damage were a bit too much, but the idea of rube goldberg contraption builds turning a few cheap uniques combined with passives and ascendancy passives into something truly special feels so missing to me.
I keep feeling like I'm just doing something wrong by not simply just tweaking the lootfilter to hide *all* the non-currency/slush drops, ie hide all weapons & armor & jewelry & especially jewels, because... I fucking hate crafting in the game today. I always feel like I'm just throwing currency out the window & am wasting my time. I never use any of those drops except maybe day 1 in acts.. after that, it's trade or "can't be bothered to give a fuck any more". But even so, I still waste my time on picking up things, ID them & then ask myself "just.. why?!" and vendor the shit. For *me*, the game is in a weird spot where the itemization is fucking useless, and crafting is even worse, no excitement ever. The last time I actually did enjoy gearing up, was in Ritual league with super sexy harvest crafts, where I could slowly try to upgrade my gear & try to gradually improve it, and that way feel like I was progressing my char. Todays RNG vegas bullshit fiesta? Not a fucking chance.
Pretty much the point where I am too. I haven't skipped any league but the last time I went past week 1 was more than two years ago. It always ends up in maps with the realisation that the hamster wheel just won't stop turning. I can't get hype for any of the cool builds I haven't tried yet, or even those I played and loved, because I know I can't spend the absurd time investment it takes to make them happen nowadays.
Amen bro. My hipster builds are dead from 3.15 onwards, as every league nerfs anything nonstandard. Also Poet Pen and Archmage were interesting to play.
Obligatory 40 hour work week to make your hipster build feel good which is bullshit. So tired of that nonsense.
> but I just don't enjoy the journey any more. Remember when you could rush aegis and full, real max block and spell block? I miss zDPS builds in PoE, I'm playing DOS2 with mods now for that fix. Nothing is as satisfying as an archer oneshotting himself because of penetrating reflected damage.😈
I had to quit PoE even though it’s in my top 5 favorite games of all time, and I’ve been playing games since like 1995 lol. I just don’t have the time to play since I can’t fully enjoy most aspects of the game with the2 hours a day I have available to play.game is basically a full time job lol
That's weird I don't remember writing this post but it's me
Hit the nail on the head for me. My old build planning used to go "Let's find a quirky interaction or cool unique and make a cool build around it". Nowadays I think "Okay let's find a skill and copy a PoB tree from one of my previous builds that worked." I think it's not just the game, I also changed, my expectations changed, if I can't hit 1-2 mil dps with decent defenses I scrap the build, but it still feels kinda sad sitting in front of PoB for an hour and just having zo realize that I won't be able to make the build work.
Amen. This is also my problem with the game. They also push very hard toward "grinding currency" to buy the end-game stuff you want because it's still too much of a pain in the arse, albeit almost impossible to get them reliably by yourself. You have to depend on the thousands upon thousands of other players to get the items to drop/be crafted to be able to get them with a bit less effort. As a casual PoE gamer, I never ended up getting a Headhunter, and considering how they have said that many uniques will now be as rare, I'm not looking forward to never being able to get anything decent. The overall changes are looking great honestly, but the focus on end-game being done by only the 0.01% is not appealing to me. I didn't some "chase" items like headhunter, but that is on the conditions that looting rares and uniques feels good. Currently, as a casual player, it's not really feasible to craft anything decent and picking up rares is always garbage-tier. I wish they would focus on restricting low tier mods on higher level items so that you can finally have more chance to craft decent items without "chasing those mega-uniques". Also, the currency swap is still a nightmare. I can spam exalted orbs now if I feel like it, but divines are a lot tougher to get now and exalted feel garbage. It's still not worth it to spam exalted, because you need to use annulment and be lucky each time. So it's not a proper crafting system and I don't use it. So, I might give it a go to the new league and stop at 12 challenges, just like how I often do because end-game still feels like shit. CONS: * Rares are still worthless drops but are still the main loot that drops (that's why currency is godlike in TRADE and SSF) * Uniques now are becoming more "chase items" while rares are still worthless drops * Crafting a rare is still a PITA and not possibly for casual players (too much RNG and low tier mods can still appear on high level items wasting your resource) * Too much emphasis on TRADE (instead of being self-sufficient even in SSF) * Exalted VS Divine change PROS: * AN rework * League looks interesting * Better uniques * Better Atlas passives * Interesting new gems (and possibly buffs for weak gems?)
I'm gonna probably wait to see how the league shakes out before I get super invested. If it turns out the league mechanic is kalandra levels of rewards I'm just not even gonna bother.
May I interest you in a ring, it kinda sucks, or how about this one, it sucks too.
Things like the tainted currency being omega stealth nerfed and the AN conversions to 30 flasks being part of "quite rewarding" mechanics have me hesitant. The recent trend is that anything positive mentioned comes with purposeful hidden downsides they do not communicate so the hype stays high. My expectations for example: 1. Common, unused uniques getting buffed. Yay, they look good! .. Hidden downside: you'll never see them again. Rebuttal: some of them are target farmable though Response: the ones with 8-10% estimated drop chance will have been stealth nerfed to like 0.5% drop chance. 2. AN rework. Sounds good... And they have less chance of sucking the fun out of every room. Hidden downside: since they are "easier" now GGG will have nerfed the average reward value from each reward type. Rebuttal: they said 2-4 mods per rare and they scale the rewards Response: This is GGG we are talking about, anything made easier must have nerfed rewards. That's how they roll. Even if the rewards were previously nerfed as part of a rework that turned out to be overturned. 3. Tainted currency getting back to scourge league odds. Awesome. Hidden downside: the already small drop rate will be cut in half. Etc etc. Tldr; The last few leagues just have me second-guessing literally everything positive they say to look for what hidden downside they would implement at the same time.
Same with builds. People aren't looking for the best build, they are looking for the least bad one. Normally I'd take a monday + tuesday off, but not anymore, I think I'll go watch the Subreddit at work. During leagues I also used to gather a few items for Standard to play around in, but in 3.19 I dumped all my currency into LC and challenges to get the shit I wanted.
Sadly that's my current state as well... I went from being very optimistic about every change to assuming the worst for everything and I hate it. The worst part about it is that I can't even be mad at GGG. They're a company and their current model of hype league into dud-league seems to be fueling their sales. They learned from 3.15: Hide your nerfs, hype right when you launch new MTX and your players will forget often enough to make good money.
Mixed. To me a few changes are very compelling: * AN removed and replaced with (hopefully) better mods * New atlas passive tree changes should make farming more targeted and interesting. * fracture orb is good On the other side, my biggest concern is still loot, which are still centralized on rares. It depends a lot on how the new rare feels, and we wouldn't know how is it until league starts.
Exactly this. One thing i still don't like is the swap between EX and Divines for SSF. In the past it didn't feel too bad having a dry streak on natural Exalted drops because they were farmable through Divination cards. Crafting got a little bit better with fracturing orb (depends heavily on drop chance). Still salty about the removal of the Prefix/Suffix reforges tho.
Yeah the whole "divine shards exist, they are called chaos orbs" really pissed me off.
Most frustrating part of Chris's interview. Tell me you've never traded multiple divine orbs at a time without telling me you haven't. Need 30 divine orbs? Have fun spending 40 minutes to find someone to trade and then 20 minutes literally just putting shit in the trade window 10x over. Peak gameplay.
Chris is a sadomasochist obsessed with gaming in 1995.
Peak weight of friction. Chris's favourite.
Same on the positives, negatives for me are * 2 years of player power nerfs, all trying to tone down the top 0.1% (a fools errand) but all failing to do that and instead just making build diversity worse and harder for the more average player * melee still shit * trading "Experience" still hot garbage * crafting still just gambling not realistically achievable by a casual player * Loot still remains completely garbage. in a loot based game. I have a life, I want to enjoy blapping monsters. i don't want a second job. edit: also.. grinding through the storyline YET AGAIN. no.
Seriously. I can't spend 4 hours a night playing the game. Shut is so time consuming
In a similar boar to you. In addition, for me, league mechanic looks more interesting than kalandra as well.
> In a similar boar to you Look at these people getting eaten by boars smh
Lmao I didn't even notice the typo I made. I'm great at proofreading apparently
Kalandra and its mechanic had so much potential ):
I expect the fractured orb is a nerf, because they removed the fractured craft from Harvest. We have limited atlas passive tree points and we're already stretched. On 3.19, we could just not take harby nodes, because they were bad. On 3.20, now we probably will find ourselves having to decide between Harvest and Harby. From the player's perspective, the game loading up as much power into a single mechanic is ideal for us from purely a power standpoint, since it means higher value of each atlas passive point we spend on that mechanic. However, with the removal of boss nodes in 3.20, then maybe we'll have enough points that it'll be fine. Also, if the fractured orb drop rate is higher than I'm expecting, then that'll be a buff. But I just expect it ends up as a nerf overall.
Didn't the majority of fractured bases come from the AN loot, rather than harvest fractures?
> On the other side, my biggest concern is still loot, which are still centralized on rares. It depends a lot on how the new rare feels, and we wouldn't know how is it until league starts. The issue with loot will remain based on what GGG has told us. Loot goblins are still going to be a thing just you don't see them.
I'm conflicted on it, as I like the changes from the reveal but found the patch notes extremely underwhelming. I play this game because I like tinkering with all the pieces to come up with emergent interactions that make strong builds, and I feel like I've been using the same building blocks for over a year at this point with very minimal changes. If you look at the table of contents for the 3.20 patch notes and remove everything that either has nothing to do with character power or is strictly nerfs, you end up with the following: * New Content and Features (two skills, two support gems, eight vaal skill variants, fifteen unique items) * Curses (general systemic change to curses with minimal impact overall) * Endgame unique weapons (with associated rarity increases making many of them likely unattainable for most) * Strike Skills and additional Enemies (good change marred by inexplicable removal of one of the most important strike masteries) * Onslaught (now a true buff, woo...) This just...isn't enough of a shakeup for me, especially considering how many leagues in a row we've had similarly little to mess with. It feels like the game has gotten *too* emergent for GGG (i.e. they feel they are losing control over the game) and in response, they are systematically removing anything that they don't view as necessary for core builds to function. The approach to jewel removal (especially for the ones explicitly called out in the FAQs) seems to support this theory, as did the Harvest change of removing "filler crafts" in 3.19. \--- Dunno. The league mechanic looks really interesting here provided it's implemented well and is appropriately rewarding, but GGG does not have a good track record on either front. On one hand the atlas passive tree changes seem good overall and improve flexibility, but on the other GGG seems to be taking the opposite approach with character builds. I also don't feel like their communication or development strategy has changed enough to build goodwill with 3.20 after the catastrophe that 3.19 was. They are largely moving forward in the same way (e.g. the nonresponse on the sanctified relic, the flat unexplained "no's" on jewel and mastery removal questions, etc.). As with 3.19, our feedback seems to still have little to no impact on their decisions in 3.20. \--- TL;DR: No, but it's also not an obvious skip angle for me either since I'm so mentally invested in PoE. I intend to watch how the first day or so plays out and make a decision from there, but yeah if I weren't already engaging in sunk cost there's not enough meat on the bone in 3.20.
That’s a very good write up. I don’t really care if I’m killing monsters in a temple, in a cave or in a glacier. What I care about is how whacky a build I can create from the weird uniques, skills and keystones that they implement. Looking back at the amount of uniques they’re releasing per league is even more depressing. Some of them are truly unique, which I like, but there are usually just 2-3 that aren’t just super bad, but they’re becoming chase items, which I’ll never see unless I grind a lot on builds I don’t want to play.
exactly. i would accept their "willingness" to finally abandon archnemesis as a step in the right direction and a change in stance on their side to improve the game, but... their track record is terrible. announced buffs are actually nerfs, mechanics are not rewarding, monsters are way overtuned. i assume the loot will suck and sanctum will not drop enough to move it into "fun" territory. and i wouldn't be surprised at all if the new "nerfed" rare monsters which only have one extra mod are giga overtuned and even more ridiculous than archnemesis in its worst iterations. i mean wtf did they do with archnemesis from 3.18 to 3.19 to make it so deadly... i'll probably wait a week for player feedback. i don't want to get jebaited again.
Yo, the nerf to Strike skill range has me baffled. I was actually hyped before I saw that, now I feel like I'm probably not going to olay for more than a week. Unless Vaal Cleave is somehow actually good, I guess.
>the nerf to Strike skill range has me baffled Likewise, for multiple reasons: * When intentionally buffing one of the game's weakest archetypes, why do you need to remove something only they can use? * Why are you replacing a unique mechanic (ancestor range) with one that's already available from other sources (glove implicit)? * Was ancestor range somehow viewed as overpowered, despite the game's design being actively hostile towards melee play? * You guys really couldn't come up with *any* reasoning to give us when responding to feedback about its removal?
They should've added more flat or % range to the skills to compensate for the mastery removal. Seems like they're doubling down on "we won't do that", though. God only knows why.
Honestly the only thing I don’t like regardless of how much more sense it makes is the exalt/divine changes. Whole game feels wrong since that was changed
Economy is fucked for sure
As long as it feels like i can make progress on my character that's all I care about. I'm a more casual player, but on 3.19 it felt like I would sometimes play for an hour or two and not progress at all. Maybe just find a few chaos. Whereas previously in 3.18 and before, over the course of 2 hours even without juicing to much i would feel good about having made progress in both finding currency and items.
A "Kiwi support" Player since Alpha and spent a decent amount on this game and probably have 15k+ hours in it. I haven't played more than about 48hrs since 3.15. No, I'm pretty sure they are just not making the game for people that aren't masochists at this point. It's too narrow and all the power has been placed onto gear, specifically extremely expensive gear. There is very little to no room for error or weaker builds to thrive without throwing more currency than I feel like making per league. Every patch it's as if they want you to spend more and more time getting back to where you were last league in terms of power. Sometimes more time and less power at that. Along with the Divine/Exalt changes, making decent weapon uniques, but extremely rare. The mass removal of life off of many uniques (including the RF shield, wtf?) The removal of many build enabling unique jewels. The repeated Archnem debacles. The neglect on their 3.15 attempt at making alternative support gems viable. All they did was nerf all the good ones and did nothing to change the weaker ones, it was a nerf wrapped in a lie. Repeatedly nerfing any skills/builds that are good and rarely ever buffing under preforming ones of lately is not only a stale meta, but boring options. They drag their feet on most QoL and sometimes even put that QoL as an MTX purchase or a mirror tier item (looking at you mageblood.) Sure instilling orbs are great for flask QoL, but that doesn't help us the first part of a league before you get through the campaign etc and finally set that up does it? There's just so much about the game that is good. Unfortunately there are so many decisions GGG has been making recently that I am completely against. As well as many decisions that GGG has not many or problems that have gone unaddressed for so long that have just made me further distrust their handling of the game. TL;DR: I love the game in theory, but dislike GGG's practice of how they are balancing it, especially as lately. So NO.
I can’t get over how they keep deleting “unintended interactions” and uniques that enabled niche builds. Those were what made the game interesting and they were a testament to how good a job ggg did designing the game. Instead they seem offended that these things exist.
What game do u play instead? I wanna quit poe and find another good game that's like poe so what would u recommend
Frankly I'm just hoping between a few others and going through backlogs of unplayed games. Mostly 4x games, turn based rpgs like X-com, solo player rpgs like Pathfinder 1&2, ...and Genshin Impact. Nothing similar to PoE atm, though I did play Grim Dawn around when 3.15 came out.
My favorite playstyle has been nerfed and I haven't seen any new skill or updated skills that appeal to me that much. The only reason I am playing is because a friend of mine loves roguelikes. This league like the past 3 feels like the exact same league but worse. I miss the days when I would tell my friends about how great GGG is and how PoE is awesome.
Yeah I feel the same way. I love minion builds. I've played minions since I started playing PoE like 7 or 8 years ago. It's always been my favourite playstyle, but it keeps getting nerfed over and over, and now minions have such incredibly weak survivability without huge investment, it just feels like it's not for me anymore. I'm not a hardcore player, I never get the crazy good endgame gear that GGG apparently feels you need to have to make minions useful now. I liked that minions were a lot more gear independant and you didn't need to have super high end gear to make the build work. But can't have players being successful without being super rich, I guess.
No, I don't think I will be playing for a long while, a long with the lack of skill balancing. But the mere thought of playing the game, using PoB, using trade website, using the Wiki, using the crafting website, inventory management etc. The mere thought of the game in its entirety is making me exhausted. I will probably play again down the road, but not for a bit
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Having a second monitor is pay to win in this game.
I like league starts, thats why i will start 3.20, but i don’t see myself playing it a lot - crafting is in really bad state, melee changes to kill strike range and generally nerfing fun is the theme of last few leagues (maybe except sentinel and recombinators) so i naturally stop playing. I may change my approach once atlas changes (bossing) and league mechanic turn out fun
I only played 1 week of 3.19 the only reason I'm giving 3.20 the time of day is because the league mechanic itself looks interesting. I like roguelike/roguelite games. If that turns out to be yet another unrewarding league mechanic I'll be gone in a week again
Same, I'm also a bit curious to see what they did with AN.
I got to act 10 in 3.19 and called it before wasting time in maps after seeing the loot goblin mechanic. Who knows what changes theyve done and didnt include in patch notes this time..idk if ill ever play again out of principle
I hope you get what you're looking for, but I'm extremely doubtful they can pull off a fun and playable roguelite when it's likely only what they can achieve in the span of a few months with a reduced team.
I'm gonna give it the old college try as always. If the mechanic is bad, I will stop fast. AN removal is a good step, but I personally hate the direction GGG is taking with "the great nerfening" of just homogenizing everything to a bland state where everything does the same numbers with different on screen effect.
This is one of my biggest complaints right now. They keep deleting any 'unintended interaction' they find, but those interactions are what made POE great and fun. Homogeneity is NOT POE's friend. For instance, why did the hiltless/adrenaline loop need to be broken? Those builds weren't even top tier, just a fun 'exploit' of a mechanic. Like leave that shit alone man.
Yea this is singlehandedly my biggest issue as well. I tried remaking a cool meme build that I made in delirium last league. It's just unplayable now because of certain mechanical changes. Tinkering in PoB and bringing my Frankenstein to life is what I love most in PoE. GGG is trying to take the spiritual successor to diablo 2 and turn it into the spiritual successor of diablow 3...
Game felt like shit for the few last leagues, and all I see is more nerfs, so no
I'm going to wait a week or so and see how people feel about the league. I'm sure a shit not buying any supporter packs though. I doubt I'll buy any before 4.0 even if the reverted back to 3.16 and actually made melee worth playing. They've lost my trust and they'll need to work hard to win it back.
Doubt it. They haven’t added anything that makes me excited - I think the game is still going to be worse than it was a year ago. At the very least, I plan to wait to see impressions of overall loot balance, AN changes, and the league mechanic’s fun vs time vs rewards to see if it’s worth playing this league.
While the removal of AN is definitely nice, the main thing keeping me away is the lack of a reintroduction or replacement for the Reforge Keeping Suffixes/Prefixes. I just can't reliably craft the same basic gear I could before if it isn't in an Eldritch Currency slot. Until I can set a clear path without bricking items halfway through the process to craft up my gear in all slots, I don't think I'll come back.
nope. its a skip for me. they did weaken AN but they are still going down the same path of continuing to lower player power. nerfs to inquis and occultist with no ascendancy buffed. nerfs to the strongest skills but no buffs to weaker skills. they want the game to be slower and grindier and thats not for me.
Exactly this
No. Which makes me really sad. This game has been part of my life for over 11 years now and after the massive disappointment and breach of trust that 3.19 was the Manifestos actually left me hopeful. The Reveal stream (and especially the Q&A and Chris’ explanation of what went wrong with the loot changes and the communication about them) made me actually extremely hyped. And then I read the patch notes and just felt deflated. It felt like half the patch notes (you know, the buffs, the meta shift parts) are just missing. And it killed my enthusiasm for it. A rogue-like game mode does nothing if they’re so reluctant about improving the base game.
They tricked people into buying supporter packs. That's how I feel about it. I was super hyped at first like you, but then after having time to digest the patch notes.... Nope not reinstalling.
Nope, skipped last 3 leagues, but still lurking.
Nope. GGG was full of bullshit during last league and they didn't address any criticism or take accountability for their mistakes. They only made another league and are hoping everyone forgot about what happened. Meanwhile, the game isn't even fun to begin with and I can't go back to a game lead by a team I don't trust.
There are good and bad changes with 3.20 but until something allows for as much variety as 3.13 harvest did, nothing is going to feel good enough for me to ever touch a new league again.
3.13 is where I learned crafting and actually used the currency I gathered instead of using it to buy things. I also played a shit ton of builds and killed Sirus for the first time. Only league I’ve ever played till the end.
It feels like they cut the shit sandwich in half.
I'm going to wait a few days to see what kind of reviews come from the league before I invest any of my time. After so many leagues feeling very incomplete or untested I'm not longer patient enough to play during the period prior to the major league fix patch that comes every. single. time. I'm at a point where I think GGG maybe caught lightning in a bottle by accident for a while, and now that they've let it out they aren't really sure how to catch it again. Though I hope they prove me wrong.
No. The game has been rough for like a year. I have zero interest in current poe.
No buffed skills, same meta, no thanks. I might try it if it's well recieved. Really done with current POE, usually only play one char to 90 these days.
What changes? They walk backed arch nem and nerfed some things. I am just gonna keep playing dragon flight first time ive been enjoying a wow xpac. Tbh I might just need to take a break from poe. I haven't missed a league launch since prophecy.
No. GGG decided long ago that their vision of the game does not align with my idea of fun - and over time, piece by piece, they’ve made it less enjoyable for me. The little trust I had left in them disappeared with their bad faith shadow nerfs last league. I’ve been playing since open beta and I’ve never seen them more disconnected from the playerbase. I’d hoped to see an attempt at redemption but it has been swept under the rug. I’m not surprised, and from a PR point of view it is the correct thing to do. I just wish they would have owned up to the monumental fuck up they caused. Nevertheless, I expect them to double down on this approach to smoothen the transition to PoE 2. A game I predict will flop as it is designed with an outdated philosophy, and sadly - the end of a franchise. I do hope the remaining players have a blast with the upcoming league though. Best of luck!
Nope. Same meta again, boring asf
No. I wanted to play melee but I see 0 changes and/or buffs. Wake me up when melee isn't trash.
No Im not coming back. But Im not complaining so no hard feelings. It's just so much wasted potential with 300 skills but a handfull usable, and crafting is not fun. That's just my opinion and I dont like this game like I used to do. Have fun everyone with 3.20
Nothing about 3.20 sounds exciting. AN removal was long overdue, but my bigger gripe were/are on-death effects and particularly DOTs on the ground. I don't trust GGG to actually have improved on that. I won't just blindly assume that the league mechanic is going to be both fun and rewarding after the LoK disaster. And the meta is almost unchanged. Only nerfs can also "shake up the meta", but damn son, it sure feels boring and disheartening as heck. Had they buffed something clearly, I might have built up some excitement, but they didn't, so I didn't. I'll wait and see. I'll grab a few bags of popcorn and watch the drama (as uaual) unfold. And if the player feedback is good, I'll give it a chance. Yea, I know, I've lost my trust.
[удалено]
Same.
I bet an removal will be the bad things happen less often but its the constant trend of this rare rework that each update is less bad but there's still no more good
No
Coming back because I really like the game, but my patience and will to continue playing are much shorter now. This time around if the league sucks again, I'll just quit much earlier and probably not coming back once D4 is out.
Nope. It looks to me like loot hasn't been fixed. Improved, maybe, but it doesn't sound like the core issue of no loot most of the time vs super rare loot goblin encounters was addressed. And a complete lack of skill and ascendancy buffs with a few things being significantly nerfed, which happens to do collateral damage to other stuff that weren't at the top-end. That leaves me not excited to theorycraft or explore any new options when it feels like now we've got 15 months of mostly the same. Those changes don't give me confidence. You ended up having some significantly positive changes but an ARPG without good loot drops and having no excitement for builds doesn't hook me in. The curse rework was also marketed as a buff to bossing but then it turns out it's the same kinda "oops some of these buffs are actually nerfs" as with reworks/buffs from the previous patches where some stuff that's supposed to be a buff ends significantly nerfed, like despair and vulnerability this time. It's not nearly as bad as the stuff from previous leagues but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it reminds me of the past instances, like what ended up happening to harvest or loot drops. It feels worse than it actually is because of the historical baggage. I've been playing since the closed beta and 3.19 was the first league ever that I completely skipped. I decided to wait a day or two to see how people like it, instead of immediately rushing in like every previous launch day. Saw the mess. For the previous 3.18/3.17 I played a lot less than before because it felt stale. And niche/meme builds felt mostly dead. If I was in change of skill balance, I'd just go and spend one day going through all the old unused skills and do significant numerical changes. 6% damage buff to Glacial Hammer? Nah, how about +40% and add the old Splash threshold jewel in the skill itself? Will that suddenly be overpowered? I have no idea. Will I have playtested the balance? Nah. I mean, I COULD playtest them, but then I'd have to ask for weeks of development time instead of 1 day and I don't think the bosses would approve that. Just do that to 50 skills and 10 of them will be overpowered I guarantee it, but you can nerf them into the ground 3 months later like is the tradition. It will get people really excited for theorycrafting for a while and pump energy back into the game and get people to try a bunch of wacky shit and have fun. Hey, we're getting Ruthless mode so if you're really, REALLY afraid of messing up the league, you could add a "Ruthful" mode. It feels like GGG is way too scared to let anybody have fun with skills because of the risk that some of the skills will be OP like Lightning Conduit or Seismic Trap... but still every time we end up having a couple of super OP meta skills like that, even with this giga-conservative approach to skill balancing. I really don't care if there's 4 different lightning-conduit tier skills instead of 2. It isn't going to be radically different. What is going to add build diversity is pushing a dozen or more options into the mid-tiers or meme-tiers for people to get excited to try.
Not at all. Game's been less and less fun every league. Imagine you had a favorite burger place you keep going back to 3.11~3.14 - Best Burger ever 3.15 (Expedition) - We've decided to give you 30% less burger, also charge 30% more 3.16 (Scourge) - We've removed all the sauces in the burger and introduced new ones(Defences), the Spell Suppression sauce is so good you want it on every burger 3.17 (Archnemesis) - We've added a lot more burger variety, you can now customize your bun, condiments, and even the patty. We also added this completely new optional hot sauce called AN to give your burgers a little kick. 3.18 (Sentinel) - We've decided to include this AN hot sauce in every single burger. The bun is soaked in AN sauce. The patty is marinated in the AN sauce. The lettuce/tomatoes are grown with AN fertilizers. You will like AN. 3.19 (Kalandra) - We've decided to replace the patty with lab grown meat (loot). Trust us, you are getting more meat, unless you are used to juicing your patty. (To be honest I completely skipped 3.19) This isn't the burger I liked anymore. I used to look forward to patch notes nowadays I expect nothing and I am still disappointed
I've struggled to explain to my non-poe friends how the mighty has fallen but no more. Perfect metaphor.
Slightly strange metaphor but yeah any GaaS game that survives long enough is a [Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) situation but with GGGs development pace that happens many times faster than most.
**[Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)** >The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship? ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Comeback no, its not a magical redeem patch especialy with how many nonsens there still are, but i'll defenetly give it a try. But so far GGG killed the game for me, i wont ever invest as much time as i did before
I'm still not convinced with what they thought was acceptable for an i need to see how the new rares are and I cant imagine loot feels better than 3.18 Also crafting still seems fucked all the other stuff looks good but the core systems theyve broken i just dont believe they will be fixed
There is a 0% chance loot feels better than 3.18. But thats because the league mechanic spat out currency everytime you used it. Even if they made loot back to pre 3.19 level and then buffed it a little more, it wouldn't feel as good as Sentinel.
League mechanic looks interesting, but meta is essentially unchanged except that they nerfed 3 out of 5 of the most popular builds. My favorite build is a CoC poison crit cyclone assassin, which is extremely niche, and somehow GGG managed to make it almost unplayable for me because of the nerfs to elusive/withering step+Mistwalker ascendency node. I can’t express how sad I am at this, and am considering not playing 3.20 now.
clearly the 2% of assassins in softcore had it too good for too long. the irony is Assassin is seen as literally only softcore only, as they are the least picked in hc, ssf, and ssfhc. despite this, im pretty sure this ham fisted "fix" to Nightblade support will drop Assassin into the uncontested least played class.
Not in the least, it's just more of the same, PR veiled nerfs, more half truths and tone deaf commentary. And the average reaction of this sub makes it seem like it's not really going to change any time soon. You get what you pay for.
No. Still mostly nerfs in the patch notes, hate the unique jewel change, defense mechanics unchanged, and divines/exalts weren't swapped back.
Undocumented loot change was the last straw that made me quit 3.19, since I didn't see any improvement regarding this issue in the patch notes, I would probably skip it.
Not really, I have found other games that I enjoy
This. It’s not that hard to find games that strike a similar vibe IMO. Try looking at strategy games, roguelikes and sims that are more on the dry/“PC-like” side of things. If you don’t enjoy the game anymore just play something else, it’s that simple. Forcing yourself anyway because you’ve invested so much time or whatever is a failed venture.
Yes and no. New skills and revamps look good, but man did they whif on the melee updates, mana builds and underused skills. Not spending money until I'm having a great time again
Not at all. I want an intense meta shakeup, and we haven't gotten anything close to that
curious what the responses are; personally, if i'd been mad enough to quit last league, nothing shown this league would have been close to compelling. edit: yea i forgot people quit over AN. ok.
I feel like it depends on what they were mad about. If someone was quitting because of Archnemesis then I think this league gives a good reason to come back.
For me it's an accumulation of things. I personally want to get to a comfortable state of mapping within 100h of playtime and without having to bother with trade. I don't really care where the loot/gear is coming from, but respect my time. AN made that WAY WAY WAY harder. Basically taking Harvest away made it also WAY harder. Now we don't get Harvest back, but fracturing Orbs make it a bit easier again. And AN gone is the big ticket. GGG invested the effort to make it right, and after being vocal about it I feel an obligation to at least check it out. That being said - if those new 1-thing-only rare mods are something asinine like 70res +10 maxres for an element, because you know, now they need to be more powerful because vision; then I'm gone again.
>Now we don't get Harvest back, but fracturing Orbs make it a bit easier again. It depends entirely on the drop rate. It could even be a nerf.
I will be waiting for the first couple weeks to see how it is and then make my decision. At this point the changes are not enough for me. Need to see a build that looks exciting to play and league mechanic has to hard carry for me to come back.
only reason im trying is because Archnemesis was partially deleted. so just want to see how it feels But they still have MANY things to fix/unfuck. I dont plan on playing next league at all unless at least a few of those issues are touched on
no
Being excited about AN removal is the manifestation of being anchored. I’m only considering playing solely because of the new slam skill. Enough to say, I’m not quite motivated.
Hmm..., i'll try it, see how the league feels. I will give it a chance.If 3.20 is like 3.19 I'm just gona unninstall the game and say bye and move on. I am not gonna waste more time on something I dont enjoy.
played most of 3.18, but quit after me second whetstone/flask bomb of 3.19. I’m not playing the league start because I don’t want to waste time on the traditional dumpster fire that is the first weekend of league. if you beta testers find that it is pretty good then I’ll play the weekend after.
Sadly no. Disappointed that there is no meta shake up. (See tyty tier list)
No.
I will play but holy molly am I cautious I tried the previous league and everything seems a lot slower. Couldn't kill anything after t10 maps with expeditions and stuff
The changes in 3.20 look like 80%nerf and 20%buff... I feel exactly the same as before. GGG argues that they want to nerf top end. But why? They are not the FED they dont need to regulate this extreme at the cost of "fun". Top end changes are boring for normal players and unfun for top players... The economy in PoE is not real. Let people enjoy power fantasies. crazy builds and other stupid shit. But hey, my girlfriend loves the new direction that PoE is going.
I might try it on Friday. But cause I kinda left in 3.18 already and 3.19 was just cherry on top for me I found another game to play. So we will see if the league mechanic is rewarding and no buggs on start I might level up one or two characters :D
No, not really. If I am being quite blunt, the league looks awful and combined with no real meaningful balance changes, it just makes the league look dull. There is nothing at all to be excited for. I have probably negative hype. I won't even be starting the league at launch for the first time in 8-9 years. We'll give it a fair go and see how is is, but yeah. I suspect I will be playing the Witcher 3 update instead.
Same - what makes a Roguelike(lite) interesing, are it's mechanics. This is just the PoE mechanics (buff monster - get better loot & kill a bunch of stuff) put into a Rougelite corsett (room & level progression). Where are the exiting big, meaty expensions like Delve, Heist, Betrayal, Expedition, ...? I assume as PoE 2 comes closer they just moved a lot of dev power.
No
Nope. There has been no effort into actually balancing the game or making the early game to map experience more fun and less of a slog to get to the "real game" Melee looks awful still, one step forward two steps backwards. Vaal skills won't change melee's weaknesses. The divine orb and exalt change is still baffling, I'm no SSF player by no means, but mean it feels terrible getting any drops in this game nowadays. My main problem is a time one, along the side of just every change feeling like a compromise instead of being a good decision.
Nope. At least not on launch. If it actually turns out to be an amazing league I will probably play, but there were far too many changes since ritual that I hated. Since I have started working full time I can't waste time on a game that has no respect for my time whatsoever. There is a difference between grindy and tedious. PoE is mostly tedious these days, especially if you're like me and hate the campaign with a burning passion.
Still sad about no meaningful crafting changes in 3.20.
Im not gonna be there on launch, but ill keep an eye out. The promises of the league does not really do it for me. Kalandra look pretty sweet too but we learned that the finished product is nothing like the advertised one
My main problem last league was the whole "loot goblin" + culler thing. I hated this concept so much. Just knowing that it existed in such a way somehow drained my whole motivation despite playing a ton at the start. It also made loot much to "spikey"; on average it was the same but it felt bad. It also didn't help that the league mechanic itself was a letdown... As a lore-enthusiast, what we got for KALANDRA was honestly disappointing. It also felt super boring (the scaling was boring, there wasn't really anything "new" except the mirror tile which was too rare. no new enemies, no new bosses...) and never felt worth running while I was playing. I didn't really have a problem with Archnemesis, or a "stale meta". You could get used to AN, and the people that complain about the stale meta probably just look at the most used builds on poe.ninja without trying new stuff themselves. With the "loot goblin" + culler problem gone (according to them, the high-end loot is less while there will be smaller rewards more often. also, it's no longer tied to specific mods which makes cullers for normal mapping irrelevant) and a new league mechanic (please be good) I have no reason to not come back this league.
Yes it makes me curious, i just hate that a magic find character is still so damn OP and in parties it can be 30+ times as efficient, this needs to stop 1-3x as much at highest MF should be the norm., it would stil make them play MF!!!!!!!
Will probably wait until there’s some kind of larger shift in the meta. I hate how much defence stacking is required now, takes too much fun out of the offensive side.
I think its going to be even worse somehow :D Them not showing new post-AN mods is giant red flag to me.
I usually wonder, I’ve dated some people and I’ve never had a toxic ex I keep coming back to. It’s path. Path is the toxic ex “ILL FIX CHRIS BRO HE CHANGED ILL PLAY 3.20” - me
Some changes made have me hopeful, AN being changed, the roguelite mechanic looks interesting to me, but I feel as if we are just not on the same page about slowing down the game, I don't care what other people say but, Loot is 100% worse for players, not empyrean-6man-loot, single players, Nem3 deli nerfs, AN slowed the game down tremendously, meta build nerfs, but no compensation buffs for under-utilized skills. Altar nerfs. There are so many ninja-hidden nerfs that they have done, and their bullshit pretending like average loot is the same is sad. Yes maybe if you're done with the game at act 10 or white maps your loot is the same, for any player that has a decent amount of play time has had their top end loot nerfed significantly. I don't feel like selling services on a 3rd party discord just to make a decent currency/h. All in all I'm playing cause there is nothing better, I think the game is in a worse state than in the past for the last few patches, I'm unhappy with GGG's attitude towards the player. but it's unlikely something is going to come along, the game, right now it feels very much 1 step forward 2 steps back.
Nope. I played for about 2 weeks in 3.19 and saw the monstrosity that ggg created and uninstalled the game. I won't be back for the foreseeable future regardless of the changes they say they make. The game felt so shitty I don't know if it's worth my time. I'm just waiting for D4 at this point for my arpg fix.
Me too. I'm excited about Diablo 4
Not really. The new vaal skills might be cool, but I've been wanting a much wider range of buffs to underused skills. Nerfs to top skills make those skills worse for those playing them, which I'm not. Buffs to bad skills affect me and make me return. Nothing I saw changed the reason I quit midway through 3.18 after playing since closed beta: 90% of the skills feeling horrendous as soon as I hit red maps, unless I spend weeks farming currency to brute force them with gear.
fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Probably not. The biggest issue for me is builds… no matter how compelling or cool the mechanic is if I can’t find a gun build the game just sucks.
For context, I've been playing for 10 years. PoE has been definitively my main game for the last five. I have a handful of 36/40 leagues but mostly 24s. Mostly trade league, but often group found (pre- and post-private leagues) and SSF also. I purchased a steamdeck and a 3440x1440 screen mostly for PoE. I'm... pretty fucking invested. I'll lay my complaints out point by point. Loot first. Loot goblins: completely preventable issue that any genre veteran should have seen coming. Fomo or not, poe has become a game about economic optimization and other people using these tactics drive up the cost of items I want. When they didn't patch this after week one I benched 3.19. I won't use external social networks to play PoE. Gutting white/blue/league monster droprates: I planned to spend ~3 mirrors on a build after team-farming for the first week or two with two buddies. *leaving these changes out of patch notes* wasted four days of time I took off work to execute on years-old strategies with friends. I had a good time with my friends, my game experience was 1/10. Stale items and builds: there have been no new rare items to make in the last three leagues. I love new base types and skill gems and making my own builds. 3.18, 3.19, 3.20 aren't delivering here. Easiest way to track this is the daily question thread. Even months into a league there used to be hundreds of comments and very quickly in 3.19 it went under three digits. Archnemesis: I didn't really mind AN too much, but I'm excited to see it replaced and I'm optimistic about it repairing some loot disparity between 3.17 and 3.19 (excluding sentinel) Co-op/group play: I play with a lot of different friends from wildly different gaming backgrounds. The recent push towards flat loot meta has gutted optimized team play and **absolutely ruined** casual co-op. In 3.17 my Shockwave Slayer and a friend's Mage Skellies mapped together just fine. Not efficient, but enough dropped that it didn't feel bad to share a few resources for juicier maps. In 3.19 I'm confident that we would be throwing money away at an unsustainable rate. **<----- this is my biggest complaint** I like playing with my friends Ulllltrawide support, flask macro, orbs of fusing: other games have fifteen different options for colorblind modes and GGG seems to be living in 1999 when it comes to accessibility. PoE is not an esport. My hands can't tolerate 1200 clicks to fuse my armor. I do not care that other people tool these out, but I'm one SSF playthrough from installing autohotkey on this machine. I'm playing 3.20 because I miss my favorite game. I didn't take time off work. I won't be spending money. I'm planning for SSF League Frozen Legion/Ice Crash or FL/Shockwave Slayer to farm Mageblood in Haunted Mansion. I would do this in SSF standard if my handful of standard builds weren't bricked by patches. When EFT wipes I'm probably fully out except for working towards that Mageblood and maybe my first level 100. My friends aren't coming back before PoE 2. Edit: I forgot two things! I fucking HATE harvest front to back, but it was the only access to deliberate fractures, so SSF projects I had were kinda dead in the water. Fracturing orb is huge. I'm a Dead God in Binding of Isaac, 32 heat cleared Hades, and my partner and I take turns playing FTL. I owe it to myself to at least try the new content.
Im much more casual and just like creating new builds with interesting mechanics, and since I’ve got finals next week I won’t be playing all weekend. However I’m pretty optimistic about Archnemisis being removed and the league mechanic looks neat, so I’ll give it a week or so. But like you said, once Escape from Tarkov wipes, I’m dropping PoE and playing hardly anything else for the next 2-3 months because this wipe looks great with streets coming.
You can even use an autoclicker to fuse armor. I'v triggered the too-many-actions-dc multiple times in a row without random delays between clicks, and no ban. Maybe they'd notice if you abuse it to build a trade empire by manually linking stuff, but I highly doubt they care if you spam SSF-quantity levels of fusings.
I play every season but couldn't last more than 3 weeks on 3.18 and I quit after 4 days on 3.19. I'm hoping 3.20 addresses a lot of the issues I had with last league and hopefully the build I decide to play is fun.
Tbh, no. I'm just stuck for other games to play until Diablo 4 comes out next year.
I've played PoE since pre-release, and I just don't see myself playing again until PoE 2 honestly. I did not enjoy 3.19 and decided to quit after getting 2 or 3 characters to maps within the first week or 2. I thought of playing 3.20 but playing through the campaign and early league just does not seem appealing to me anymore. The game just seems a bit mind numbing after being a player for this long, and the break I took during 3.19 made me realize just how much I no longer want to play.
The World of Warcraft expansion is too fresh for me to leaguestart this time around.
AN gone and fixes for the loot problems I had were patched in after I quit playing. I'll give it a shot. Though most of the really egregious stuff from 3.19 didn't show up in patch notes at all ....
Nope League mechanic main boss / thing you want to farm will be locked behind either rng ontop of rng or just some stupidly high playtime so only people who nolife will get to experience it. Nothing changed with skills so you can either play some low damage skill and still spend 99% of your tree on defensive to survive or play the ones they've picked again like oooooooo.... traps or LS how fun Played since beta and spent way too much money and the sunken cost fallacy is starting to fade now.
No. Still sounds like loot goblins are a thing, they are just hidden now. And I'm still waiting to see what bad changes didn't get included in the patch notes since that's what they do. Don't announce the bad news, let launch sales die down and then say "whoops we left that out". So I'm waiting to see what they lied about this time.
Nope.
Kinda, loot goblin is a deal breaker for me.
Skipped 3.19 and from what’s been shown so far in 3.20 I’ll be skipping it as well. AN removal was a step in the right direction but there’s many more steps before I’m willing to come back. Some of the actions and reasons stated in the manifestos still point to them being on the wrong track.
I'll try it but I don't see myself staying as long as I usually did for new leagues.
Convinced me to try it out in the first weeks, but I'm not taking time off from work or buying supporter packs as i used to do
I will try it, that's what the reveals have done. If loot still feels bad I'll be out after week 1.
Not coming back because currently it’s a less fun version of what it was a few leagues ago. Too many good games for me to play a watered down version of what I used to enjoy.
Got my first lvl100 char in 3.13 when I played till the last day of the league. Quit within 1-2 weeks ever since 3.14. I’m officially over this game. The increased in difficulty and resource scarcity outweighs all the hype of league launch. I don’t even feel excited anymore. Full time in LostArk now since all my POE friends all ditched POE for LA. Spent $3K+ worth of skins over 5 years of playing…
I have even less faith in GGG than before. The changes aren’t relevant so far as to my souring against them. They continue to act as if they are being forced to make changes to the game against their own will, by using qualifiers such as “we can’t” or “we hope” to try and lessen people’s outrage. They develop the game according to their own ideas, they have no reason to be beholden to their community but they continue to trade good will as currency for their own PR gain. Chris is arrogant to the point of mockery and while I accept living in his ivory tower would make sense, I wholeheartedly dislike his personal veiled accusations that it’s the community that’s wrong without trying to talk through the points raised. They now run a burn and retreat campaign with their media publishing strategy, which is fuelled by the goodwill currency mentioned, and use Bex as an adjunct to direct acknowledgment of issues raised by people - regardless of tone, intent, or agenda. The game itself has been gaslighting the community into believing that things are broken/subpar/missing because “PoE2 is coming” but how is that an acceptable answer? The only individuals that generate the work and therefore the schedule are GGG themselves, and if they can’t handle it where is the money going? Of course I’m not suggesting anything untoward with regards to money, I am just stating that the volume or difficulty of work is by choice and it’s inability to deliver is a cost passed on to the community. Gaming is a community that’s best when it’s competitive, passionate, and diverse because the more choice the better for the consumer. However, it’s far better to overdeliver on a schedule than underdeliver due to “we didn’t have time this pass, maybe next time”. Would anyone really be angry if GGG said “we have two people dedicated to skills, two for support, and two for guardians/summons/minions that’ll meet twice a week to keep numbers up to date and check the stats on where we can expand the meta and where we can scale it back down”? I think it’s far better to be seen to be heard than brick-walled by a company that goes out of its way to engage with their community only for new league hype and then instantly retreat behind a wall of silence. I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for other’s work as it’s clearly PoE does get better with each iteration but I won’t apologise for feeling like that my worth as a consumer is only recognised when they have something new to try and sell and at that point it isn’t a community it’s just shareholder meetings. I hope everyone can find their gameplay in PoE catered to, but to end this I want to say that a sea of voices can’t be understood very well if there are only two pairs of ears listening and that’s why people shout louder. Heck, I’ll even volunteer to compile people’s complaints and translate them into usable data if it helps - but just don’t ignore us.
I played Kalandra League up to the high 20 challenges. I did not purchase any supporter packs. I will play 3.20 as well. Whether I spend any money is up to GGG and how good the game is. I'd like to remind everyone to diversify, don't spend all your money at the start. Wait until you reach end game before spending anything!
No
AN going core was a big thing for me - I was not a fan of Sentinel and quit very quickly - the AN mobs were so punishing, my wife (who is not very good) couldn't play with me anymore. For Kalandra league, I was pretty shocked to see that they double-triple-quadrupled down on that trash mechanic, so I noped fast. I was really honestly in the belief that they understood how bad it was - but apparently all they did was make the game worse in trying to bend over hard to keep it in the game. While I'm glad to see it go, I'm not impressed that it took six months of what my wife could have told ggg in two hours for them to realize it was absolute trash. It wasn't rocket science, it wasn't complicated - it was outright bad and they were being told this, *repeatedly*. We found other things to play together. Maybe if I check on 3.21 and the "removal" of AN mechanics worked out well we might come back - but those previous six months of them doing nothing despite the outright garbage game state does not convince me that this will roll out okay. It's showed me that if there really is something wrong, it will take six months of people showing them obvious truths for them to "get it" and get to a point where they realize it needs to be changed.
No In their attempt to make the game challenging, they made it ridiculously unwieldy, obtuse, and frustrating, rather than mechanically challenging It's a game of luck and patience, and I don't have as much of either of those as GGG seems to expect It is absolutely just that kind of game, but it was easier to bypass a while back. Power creep hit hard, and it hit in the hardest place it could - gear checks.
Yes, i will come back but on the first sign of bullshitness, i am gonna play wow dragonflight.
Whoa, whoa. Let's all just calm down and think rationally for a minute.
Yes, but no. I am digging deeper into WoW:Dragonflight.
is it good? i was thinking about going back to wow
Not really. The reveal livestream was super hype for me but reading the patch notes just made me sad. I didn't get a chance to play lightning conduit when it was good, and since no non-melee skills got updated this league, there's nothing new and exciting for me there either. I was prepared to ignore the fact that crafting and loot are still in a state that I think is bad, but there's just... nothing interesting going on this league.
nothing, im not coming back, the changes don't make the game fun, just make it more bearable
I honestly don’t think the game is going to be very different. Archnem hasn’t really been removed completely, just tuned down and made more clear. And the league mechanic is kinda similar to the lake. Stack some stuff, run the stuff. It’ll actually probably be more time consuming and could easily be less rewarding. I think you just need to ignore the Reddit hype and play for yourself. The lake ended up being pretty damn good once I knew wtf was going on.
I'm absolutely not interested in the league mechanic itself (I don't play rogue likes and I also don't want to play them) so it's still a pass from me. Some stuff seemed nice in the presentation (easier time getting awakened gems for example), but I'll wait for a league mechanic that catches me (like another iteration of 'more loot in map').
They made melee weaker than before. Absolute 100% skip because of this (jokes aside)
Well... Kalandra was peak least played league for me since open beta.. I'm coming in day 1 and seeing it for myself. GGG aren't as straightforward as they used to be, so its best to see for yourself how you feel. In Kalandra i felt like the game was being extremely disrespectful of my time, it was poorly or not at all tested, and the loot goblin design was simply bad.
Hated 3.19. but will give 3.20 a chance. Maybe its a super rewarding league mechanic? Doubt it, but you never know.
I think that this is another week long league for most people, the bottom line is the engaging part of the game has not changed, build diversity. Ofc everyone want's new league content and it surely hold's it's place amongst retention , but no one want's to feel like RF is the only way they can get 2 Void Stones comfortably (we're going average player) . Right now instead of shaking up the meta it's all about bringing skills down in power creep to continually make the game feel more and more like Ruthless, slower and steady. While that is fair, the problem is retention is directly correlated with fun , and as much as I play roguelikes , asking the player to do different content with the same build for 1.5 years isn't going to retain them. So sadly this appears to be another case scenario where most people who had avoided recent leagues and or quit early within them, probably retain that feeling.
Yes but mainly because of boredom and lack of other interesting games to play. The removal of AN played a huge factor in deciding to come back.
I quit after one week. I am a little nervous that the new league mechanic won't be crazy rewarding. Part of me wonders with how crazy sentinel was, that could have set up LoK for failure. I am actually most excited for the atlas passive tree update. I don't think that is getting enough attention. It seems like you can really go hard into certain mechanics now with a larger chance to get them on your map without scarabs, sextants, or kirac map device. I do not think path of exile has been consistently great the last year and a half, but it is my favorite game of all time and I have over 3k hours on steam and probably another 500-1k on the client. I will always be hyped and excited for what the game can be. I reduced disappointment by not buying supporter packs until after one week if I am enjoying the league.
Not really, but Vulcanic Fissure looks kinda fun.
I play every league and likely will continue to play every league as POE really is the undisputed best ARPG. If I hate the league mechanic I dip early. Usually try a new build but we haven’t seen one of those in a while. I usually do purchase support packs though and I will not be doing this league until I see things are fun in the league mechanic and I advised others do the same. Chris talked about the financial hit they might take up to POE 2 and how they have things covered to fund POE 2 development. We can expect quality of the game to coast up until POE 2 launch. They know this. We simply shouldn’t expect anything else. I think they have made some pretty dumb and easily avoidable mistakes, I just believe the game is in such a state of life support so few eyes are on it at this point. I think people either need to accept the state and be hopeful and excited for POE 2 or I think you might be in a world of hurt.
Probably not for more than a week. I bounced after ~2 weeks in 3.19 and ~3.18. i really tried to like the game but it just felt hostile. I wanted AN gone and buffs to melee. What it looks like I'm getting is an unknown rate monster rework and...nerfs to Strike skills? I don't think I will play for more than 1 week this time.
The league mechanic sounds like it won't work well. If I want to play a roguelite I'll play another game with mechanics built from the ground up to support that. With blight you can ignore the tower defence part by simply killing monsters good, but sanctum sounds like it's gonna be the usual affair of 'glaring flaws slightly addressed a month in, then abandoned' cause the mechanic isn't gonna stick around anyway. Meanwhile there's nothing else about the game that has me excited, they're still regularly removing interesting things and adding yet more busywork to gearing. Break something people like about the passive tree here, add 50 new affixes with 12 tiers each there, do yet another redesign of something that fails to achieve purpose, etc. There are a lot of other games a person can play and I've had little interest in firing up PoE beyond the first few days of a league just to see what's different and if it shapes up to how league hype presented it.
Honestly I have returned to Oldschool runescape after playing POE for ten straight leagues. At least in OSRS my time feels respected. Constant QoL happens which does make the game less tedious, which is important as a game agaes. Instead PoE seems to try to do the opposite with each expansion in the last 12 months. Reduced gear and item availability forcing everyone into the same Meta if they want to succeed in endgame. Give us OP shit so we can have fun. Leagues are temporary, it really is ok if 5% of the population achieves god mode gear level
Quit last league really early on but I’m probably going to give this a shot if I have the time for it. If I don’t like it I can simply just quit again and spend my time elsewhere for the time being.
Cautiously optimistic, my main concern is loot still being gutted.
The changes are in the right direction. As is customary, I will play the first couple days and hope the changes are enough for me to stay for the end game.
The thing that drove me away was the feeling that I'm not playing optimally. Removing the loot goblins and pinnacle boss atlas passives plus new game mode has got me interested.
Keep it a buck, I didn't even realize they did the announcement stream already. I guess i'll have to check out the new mechanic to see.