Good Morning Folks! Happy Monday after the starting weekend of the Necropolis League in Path of Exile. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about my impressions of the league so far. I will warn you there is going to be a heck of a lot of negatives in this discussion. I feel like I should throw out as a disclaimer that I am enjoying myself despite the negatives, but that there are a fair number of them. This is probably the worst-designed league I have played so far, full stop. I’ve been active for Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, Crucible, Trial of the Ancestors, Affliction, and now Necropolis. It is also important to separate the sandbox state of the game from the league mechanic because during Kalandra the thing that everyone was complaining about was the sandbox state of the game not necessarily the league mechanic itself. Necropolis has a fairly good sandbox state of the game, but a pretty shit league mechanic.
The Bad – The League Mechanic
I think the core problem with Necropolis is that you cannot skip the league mechanic. During Affliction League you could create some downright unplayable maps by juicing with wisps too hard… but that was a choice that you specifically made not something that was forced upon you. If you really cared about map completion you could just ignore the mechanic and the game played as though the league mechanic did not exist. For Necropolis, starting with the second map, you are having certain downsides thrust upon you that there is no real viable way of getting rid (at least not without investment in another league mechanic). This is what is causing Ruthless players and some Hardcore players to outright quit the league already.
I personally just don’t really engage in the mechanic at all. I never take a look at what the modifiers are or engage in the ability to swap them around… because the mechanic itself is largely uninteresting. It feels like there are downsides but I have not really seen equivalent “juicing” of my content in order to make up for it. In theory, you should be using these items that dropped called Allflames that replace or augment monsters on your maps in order to remove the modifiers that you don’t want to run. A lot of these add specific loot pools to the monsters, but these rarely if ever seem to pay out. I’ve added many of the “Pack Can Drop Omens” allflames and have yet to see a single Omen in this league. The side effect of doing this means I have to fight those awful chaos cultists from Affliction that cast the ability with the purple chaos flowers. I would say 99.9% of the time I don’t even notice that I have made a change to the map, but then that 0.1% something one-shots me from off-screen.
In theory, we are running all of these maps and fighting all of these haunted monsters in the chance of collecting bodies for our morgue, which we will then use for crafting “epic” items. What I was not expecting going into this league is how often bodies would drop, and how generally uninteresting the entire experience of collecting them feels. We can store 64 corpses in our morgue before needing to either incinerate, bury them for crafting, or extract the monster for external storage in our stash via an empty coffin. Empty Coffins can be purchased from Arimor the Gravekeeper for 1 Chaos Orb. Nothing about this crafting system so far makes me think it will ever be worth spending a chaos to itemize a corpse for sale on the market. So instead I spend a lot of time incinerating corpses when they fill up.
You are probably thinking “Bel, why are you even picking them up if they are not interesting”… that is another problem with this league. When a corpse drops it creates this giant UI element that blocks whatever might have dropped under it. There is no way to hide these corpse identifiers and as a result, you basically have to loot them if there is something that dropped and is being hidden underneath said UI element. This feels awful. I have no clue why these did not just drop as items for you to pick up. The whole mechanic of waiting for an animation to play out in zone as Arimor comes to collect the corpse looks cool the first time you see it… but after a point just needless animation cycles. By the time you have completed the campaign in an ARPG… the gameplay is about efficiency and not immersion. I feel bad that someone spent so much time lovingly animating this nonsense only to be the source of ire for players as it ubiquitously “gets in our way”.
So then you are thinking… but Bel, why don’t you just use the corpses to craft? The problem is that the crafting system feels bad too. My expectation was that corpse crafting would be something akin to Fossils where you choose the types of modifiers that you want on an item, and then craft the item with a heavy bias towards generating those affixes. Per Lolcohol which is a POE community crafting channel, you need to stack something akin over 2000% increased chance to come even close to guaranteeing a specific affix family. This morning I threw away some corpses on an example where I stacked 200% chance for cold damage and 500% chance for lightning, thinking I might at least create a baby tri-elemental bow for an alt. What I got instead was a corrupted bleed bow with cold damage on it, that I would not have even picked up had it dropped on the ground. The system feels “fine” while you are leveling because it is a rare item instead of a normal or magic item. However, it seems like you are better off just doing crafts off a single stat because the end result is going to likely be unusable so no point in investing much time in each craft.
The big problem with the entire system is that you can’t really choose your crafting base. You can assemble some corpses and say you are going to craft something for a specific slot, but you don’t really have much more control than that. For example, if you were going to play Explosive Arrow Ballista… you would specifically want a Short Bow or Thicket Bow for the attack speed. You could arrange twenty-some corpses with the ideal stat combinations for your bow… but wind up with an Ivory Bow instead and have a completely bricked craft as a result. Instead it feels like the best results are just throwing random shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. For example, these three items that I photoshopped over the crafting UI… were single corpse crafts, none of which actually got the stats that I included in the craft. It is chaos spam, but generating an item to go along with the random stats. The entire process is worse than having a random rare drop on a map, because at least then you can decide to pick it up based on the item base.
The Good – Sandbox Changes
So all of my complaints aside about the league mechanic… I am having a heck of a lot of fun and in large part, it is due to the Atlas and Scarab changes. Right now with my Atlas passives configured as I have them, I have an 80% chance to see Niko on every map and an 80% chance to see Jun. In practice, this feels like 100% of the time I have both Niko and Jun allowing me to progress Delve while also farming Betrayal enchants. There are one or two more Betrayal enchants that I want before I ultimately drop Jun entirely and start investing in some other league mechanic.
Because I have had such reliable access to Niko and as a result Sulphite, I’ve had the easiest progression into Delve that I have had in any league. Normally “breaking delve” is a bit of a pain in the ass as you keep farming little chunks of sulphite and making small amounts of progress over the course of many maps… because without a huge infusion of currency, you could not afford to buy Sulphite Scarabs in bulk. Instead of needing to rely on Scarabs the Atlas passives are all but guaranteeing that every map I am going to be filling my coffers so that I can get back down into the mines faster. I am currently sitting down around 100 Depth and found my first city last night before running out of juice. The whole map awhile, delve awhile cadence has been super enjoyable because it feels like I am making equal progress down both paths.
Similarly, the Scarabs themselves no longer feel like unobtainium. Generally speaking, I would not see large amounts of scarab drops until I had reached the point in the tree where I could start speccing into seeing Operative Strongboxes. Now instead Scarabs are just on the general loot pool and I started seeing them before I even finished the campaign. They feel fluid enough that I am spending them way more often because I know they are a relatively renewable resource. I’ve not seen a ton of the super rare scarabs, but I have picked up a few juicy ones like one that gives you a decent chance of duplicating drops. Right now I am mostly focused on map objective completion to build out my Atlas but as soon as I start running maps for fun and profit… I will likely be using way more scarabs than I did previously.
I’ve also had a fairly lucky league as a whole so that has helped with my mindset significantly in spite of the lackluster mechanic. I got my very first Divine Orb drop in Act 4, and then followed that up with another drop in Act 8, and another in Act 9. I was able to cash one of those in for an infusion of chaos orbs in order to buy some of the needed items to get my build up and running. Having some sort of liquid drop like that helps a ton when you are in a trade league economy. I am mostly sitting on the other two because the price of Divine Orbs to Chaos is still pretty low right now. Now that I am down at Delve I am generating enough raw Chaos drops to keep up with my assorted early needs. When Delve prices spike as crafting projects start to come online… I should be able to liquidate my resonators to get the rest of the things I need to finish out my build.
I am still running a four-link chest and just got a four-link helm and four-link gloves up and running. I am not even vaguely close to the final configuration of this build but it is humming along nicely. I made it through the campaign during the podcast on Saturday night, and then spent yesterday largely working on progressing my atlas and delve simultaneously. At this point, I have made it through 39 of 115 maps which seems like solid progress. I am a little bit behind where I was last league start as on the Monday after the start I was apparently sitting at 44 maps. However, I struggled to get engaged with Delve at all in the beginning so I was probably a bit more focused on mapping than I am right now with my attention being equally split between the two game modes. All in all, though I am much happier with where I am currently than where I was at that point with Boneshatter.
Even though the league mechanic is a bit of a shit show I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am hoping that we see some early patches that may tweak how things work a bit. I would love to see them make the mechanic optional and then change the way corpses drop and maybe change the weighting a bit for crafting purposes. There are still some interesting things that can happen during this league, namely with the “haunted modifiers”. While roaming around I crafted a low-level chest that wound up rolling “Gems Can Be Socketed In This Item Ignoring Socket Colour” which seemed really freaking strong. Basically, I am not giving up hope that after some tweaks this won’t be one of the better league mechanics at least for crafting purposes.
So here I ask you. Did you start something for the Necropolis League? What are you playing? What are you thinking about the league mechanic so far? Was I overly harsh in my criticism? Drop me your thoughts below.