Yesterday I decided to give Microsoft $25 to access Avowed early. Essentially I noticed that Battle.Net was showing it as available through Gamepass but only the Deluxe edition could start playing early. I would honestly love to see Microsoft migrate all of the Gamepass PC games over to the Battle.net launcher, because really it feels like a better interface than essentially going through the Microsoft store via the Xbox app. Essentially Avowed is what if Obsidian made their own Elder Scrolls Game, this time set in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity. So far it feels very Morrowind to me, in that you are arriving on the docks of a far flung destination… filled with all sorts of creepy fungus growing everywhere. I am playing a melee character so far and the combat feels pretty enjoyable.
I got my first companion, which is essentially a Shark dude straight out of the Tigersharks Cartoon. Essentially we are adventuring together out of convenience at the moment, but I assume some events are going to happen that bind us together going forward. I know there are other companions but right now I am digging Kai because he gives me the ability to burn things down, since I am not going down the magical route. I believe I can make my own firebombs eventually out if this plant that I occasionally find laying around. One of the objectives of the tutorial area was to shoot one of those plants down so it fell onto some vines and burned it to open up a new area, which makes me think at some point I can use the same plant to do the same thing in other areas.
I’ve not made it super far but I am enjoying it. There are these adorable Aye Aye meets Lemur meets Cat things all over the island that sort of purr when you get close to them. Unfortunately this particular one meets a grim fate in the opening cinematic. I’ve heard this is around a 40 hour campaign start to finish, which seems fairly reasonable. It is open world, but open world within the confines of a fixed map level so there are is a lot of exploration, but it doesn’t really let you stray too far off the beaten path. I am hoping at some point I find a companion with some healing spells because right now I am having to chug a lot of healing potions to keep topped off after combat. I specced into this thing that heals back 50% of the damage that was dealt after combat, but that still makes a lot of the fights a battle of attrition.
Over in Pohx League I did a safehouse and got one of the crafting benches that allow you to swap one Divination Card for another random one. The first one I turned in was nothing special, but the second one landed me a Brother’s Gift card which I immediately turned in for 5 Divine Orbs. I’ve not been terribly wealthy during Pohx league, but then again I have not really focused on trying to make currency. Given that it is a private league, everything costs way more than it would during a normal league economy. This is especially noticeable on the currency exchange, because buying relatively simple things… like a Tainted Fusing for example costs around 50 Chaos each. Gemcutter’s Prisms similarly are really expensive so I figure at some point I am just going to chain run a lot of Labyrinth to get gems upgraded. I purchased every single Ice Trap of Hollowness in the entire league and have been leveling them all to 20 so that I can attempt to corrupt a 21/20% gem.
Immediately after turning in the Brother’s Gift card, I took four of those Divine Orbs and converted them into an Omen of Connections. Now that these exist in the game, this is more often than not who I end up getting my six-linked chest. I was running a Ritual/Einhar Atlas quite a bit trying to get either this or a Black Morrigan so I could use beast crafting to do the same thing. The new Gem that I have mixed in is Cold Penetration and lord does it make a massive difference. I also added Bonechill to my Skitterbots and together I am dishing out a ton more damage. I bought this chestpiece ages ago and I had been throwing fusings at it in vain thinking that either I would six-link it the old fashioned way or I would earn enough currency to do it the easy way. I’ve since corrupted my old one and got a white socket on it, so I will probably throw the first tainted fusings at it trying to six-link it so I can sell it for a decent profit.
I am pretty happy with my progress in Pohx league and honestly… would be fine if I don’t make it any further. I’ve completed 110 out of 115 maps, with the remaining 5 maps all being uniques. I will probably start using Singular Scouting Reports when I get Kirac missions to try for the remaining maps since I can’t really afford to buy any of them off the market right now. I’ve finished two of my voidstones, and I might make a run at Uber Elder and Maven, but I am in no rush to do either. If they happen organically it is cool, but I am not necessarily going to push my way through it. I still do not love bossing and I also feel way too squishy to reasonable deal with the damage output from those encounters. I would essentially have to perform both of them perfectly… and I can’t say I have ever done that. I did however do a no-death Eater of Worlds which made me happy. Searing Exarch though was a complete and total mess, which is funny because as Righteous Fire that fight is a cakewalk.
I say I am happy with my progress in Pohx League in large part because I know come the 20th I will not be playing it anymore. Yesterday GGG released the full trailer for the Legacy of Phrecia Event and with it came the start date of February 20th. Which gives me eight days of undivided attention before Monster Hunter Wilds comes out and I tag out to play that with friends. I have no clue at all what I am going to play. Right now I am leaning towards either doing Poison Summon Raging Spirits on Servant of Arakali Shadow or try and build something Righteous Fire themed on either Ancestral Commander Marauder or maybe Polytheist Templar. The problem with that last one is I do not think there are four ascendancies that will help me out… Scavenger Scion could probably also work. If I do go RF, I will probably wait to see what ideas Pohx has before going down that path. I am also somewhat interested in 100% melee with Behemoth Marauder.
Have you played any of Avowed yet? Are you going to be joining the nonsense of the Legacy of Phrecia Event in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
Good Morning Folks! Since I finished the season in Diablo IV, I am now much more focused on Pohx League. I am very only likely to be dipping my toes back into Necromancer fun times when Ace wants to play, and particularly as we work on some of the seasonal objectives for them. In Pohx League I rolled something that was completely new to me, and it has been shockingly fun. I had never really played a Trickster before, or honestly gotten anything based on the Shadow class to maps. I’ve also not played a pure traps build even though Righteous Fire derives a lot of its damage based on Fire Trap. Ultimately I set out wanting to try a Trickster and then found a build that seemed like it might be enjoyable with that Ascendancy and rolled with it.
This build my friends… is ludicrous. I’ve never played anything with this level of full screen coverage. Sure my lightning arrow and later elemental hit of the spectrum builds could off screen enemies, but nothing to this point has ever just blanketed the entire screen in death. Yesterday I made some significant tweaks to the build and migrated to the “final form” and shifted over to Ice Trap of Hollowness. This is an alternate version of Ice Trap that comes from the Labyrinth that essentially scales up the area of effect of the traps, so that there is a dead spot in the center but MUCH wider coverage. It also has a much shorter time to trigger on its own, which makes it prime territory for some shenanigans.
Essentially to exploit the benefits of this alternate version of Ice Trap, we swap so using the Sunblast unique belt that makes it so enemies cannot trigger your traps, but allows you to throw 2 additional traps and explode on their own significantly faster. A perfectly rolled Sunblast is 75% reduced trap duration, but I was only able to afford a 61% one in Pohx league given the limited market. Since Tinkerskin works exclusively based on when traps are triggered, this means we need to move away from that chest and the most common choice is to go with a Carcass Jack for the additional Area of Effect and Area Damage scaling. The end result… is just truly silly for map clear because you essentially hit the entire screen at once.
More important than that, since I can easily have 17 traps up at once there is quite a lot of overlap which leads to shotgunning. The trick however is that you need to dance around the screen to limit the amount of mobs that are in the dead spot in the center that deals no damage. For bossing it is pretty straightforward to swap back to using the normal Ice Trap but it does mean having to take a moment to swap out your primary gem. I’ve never really loved gem swapping, but it does make enough of a difference to be worthwhile and will be even more so if I can get a slightly better roll on my Sunblast belt. What is nice about this build is with the swap it is both an extremely fast mapper and a pretty competent bosser. If you are curious I dumped a POB of the state of my build.
The only thing really lacking with this build is general defenses. I have enough layers to keep me from getting one shot, but I do have to hit my potion way more often than I would care to. There are a lot of things that I ultimately need to do to scale up the defensive layers, but the biggest one would be a load more evasion. Right now I have around 65% evasion and 90% lucky spell suppression combined with around 3500 hit points and 1700 energy shield. The only thing that is really going to one shot me is chaos damage, because I still have negative resistance in that department. Essentially the build is good enough to probably finish out the Atlas and unlock a few of the boss encounters, but would really need to find better versions of almost every rare slot in my build to make it feel a bit more comfy. Were I playing in a normal trade league this would not be a problem at all… but in a limited time event league there just isn’t a ton of stuff available for prices that I can afford.
I think much like it was in NecroSettlers, my first goal is going to be unlocking my full Atlas. When I get my third passive tree I plan on building it out to be Ritual and Einhar for the purpose of trying to farm either a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to turn my five-link into a six-link. I am pretty happy with the state of my build craft in Path of Exile, where I can make a character function without trade intervention more or less. I still like trading for specific upgrades, and I like selling random stuff as well… but I like knowing that I can mostly get a build off the ground and capable of mapping on my own. I will likely never be a big crafter, nor someone who dives deep into market manipulation… but I do like that I can be fairly self sustaining. That is a pretty huge thing coming from the very rocky starts that I had back in Sentinel and Kalandra leagues to where I am today.
Good Morning Folks. I had taken a break in Diablo IV because I knew the Lunar New Year event was right around the corner, and a lot of my remaining achievements for the seasons journey would simply require me to grind a ton. I figured if I was going to be grinding, I might as well be getting credit for the Lunar Awakening event. This was great in theory, but it turns out that it is a really bad event to be doing with friends. All of the things that are actually fun to do with other people… reward zero credit towards the event. The only truly reliable method for grinding this out is to run a stupid amount of Nightmare Dungeons. These feel bad on the best of terms, but somehow feel even worse with a party. As a result we did a few of these… decided it was not a good time… and then moved on with our lives.
Neither of us had been playing a ton, and as a result we had not gathered up that many boss materials… but still made the effort to summon what we had. Ace’s cat however had other ideas and we got cut short after three bosses in the rotation. However this was enough for me to get my first Mythic item to drop… which was unfortunately Doombringer and not something I could use… but I turned it into a shard and got the chest-piece I wanted for my build. I am uncertain that yesterdays event patched in the fixes to the Mendeln ring, because I did not feel any stronger. I also did not see anything in the patch notes specifically calling it out.
At this point I have unlocked three of the caches on the Ancestral Favor path, and honestly it might be most efficient to just run around looking for the world events associated with this instead of purposefully grinding. The big problem that I am having with this event is that it is so limited in scope as to how you can progress it. In theory if I were doing this event, every activity would reward at least some credit towards the reputation system. Instead the only thing that you can do with other players that seems to reward anything is Nightmare Dungeons, which are legitimately the bottom of the rung when it comes to “fun things you can do with friends”. I think I will probably push a little bit towards this goal each day, and hopefully over the course of the event I will unlock everything. I am going to get bored if I try and mainline it however.
With that in mind, once we adjourned for the evening due to cat aggro, I went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening in Path of Exile. My build feels relatively solid at this point and while I have moments where I take stupid amounts of damage… this is largely caused by bad map rolls rather than endemic to the build itself. I’ve been running my Delve atlas tree and slowly working on “breaking delve” which is the process of slowly upgrading the various levers enough to where delve begins to feel like a reasonable activity.
Ultimately my goal is 150 depth for now, and I need to upgrade my darkness resistance significantly more in order to do that level comfortably. I am also slowly upgrading my sulphite capacity so that I can spend more time down in the mines once I have filled up from mapping. I like the Delve virtual cycle of doing some maps then doing some delve until I run out of sulphite. Ultimately my goal is to get to 150-200 depth and start chasing cities, because at that level I can get all three types of cities and their associated boss fights. In theory once I start gathering up resonators, I will also start getting a reliable income to spend on upgrades… or at least the few upgrades that are available in a semi-private league.
I am not sure how long Pohx League is going to stay active, but GGG has upgraded the cap to 40k players and I believe made it available to everyone. On top of that they have also started to spoil information about the event league with nineteen new ascendancies. It is going to be called the Legacy of Phrecia Event and this morning they shared the Harbinger ascendancy for Witch, and the Gambler ascendancy for Duelist. Sir Gog has also released a video doing a bit of a deep dive into these two ascendancies. Given how wildly different these are going to be… it makes me think this is probably going to be a void league aka a league where the characters do not transfer into standard. They seem far less generalist, and more designed for each to be played in a very specific manner. For example how good the Harbinger ascendancy is… will rely heavily upon whether or not the Harbingers you summon are permanent minions… or if they are on similar cooldowns to the uniques that the abilities originally came from.
I’m 60 maps deep into the Atlas at this point and have knocked out most of the white and yellow options. At this point I need to start tempting fate and running corrupted red tier maps to keep expanding out my passives. The thing is I am not really pushing it nearly as hard as I would during a normal league start, because I have done this progression a few times for Settlers. I unlocked the full Atlas when the league launched and then did it again with the Necro Settlers event launched. I will likely finish up 115 of 115 in this league as well, just because it is a thing that ends up happening if you play often enough. With me doing Delve, I am hopefully going to encounter more map caches which will speed up the process.
So right now my plan is to do Lunar stuff until I get bored… and then drop back down into old comfortable Path of Exile grind mode.
Good Morning Folks! At least I hope it is still morning by the time I get this blog post out there. This thread is a bit out of ordinary for my normal post, and you are essentially getting a stream of consciousness rant about things that I think need to be improved in the game. Generally speaking I take more effort to shape my arguments, but this is pretty much just raw snippets of feelings. It might lead you to believe that I hate Path of Exile II. I would not have spent the last two hours randomly jotting things down if I hated the game. In fact I think that depending upon the path it takes… Path of Exile II could be the best ARPG in another few years eclipsing the greatness that has been the original Path of Exile. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on here. I think the game has “good bones” to borrow a term used by home renovators. However in its current state there are a lot of things that are just not working.
I feel like I also have to preface this statement, that at this point I have spent almost 200 hours playing Path of Exile II since its launch. I have leveled a Titan to level 78 and have since shifted to an Infernalist which I have taken to 88 and continue pushing it forward. I have played the worst class and one of the absolute best classes, and the experiences were wildly different. A lot of my early complaints about Path of Exile II just do not exist when you are playing a well designed class. I also feel like it is important to state that I have around 4000 hours played in Path of Exile 1, and started seriously playing in the Sentinel league and have made it to the endgame in every league since then. I’ve built a bunch of different viable characters even though I fell in love with Righteous Fire and keep playing those each league as well.
I’m also not really expressing a lot of radical opinions that I have not seen bandied about in the Redditsphere. However I felt like it was time to unburden my soul with a good rant. I am not even going to make the pretense of trying to break up the block of text with images. You are warned… big damned wall of text forum post mode has engaged.
One Portal Softcore Is Bad
Okay, this is probably the thing that annoys me the most about Path of Exile II. I was fully on board with the concept of the bosses resetting their health back to full after failing to kill them. What I was not on board with was still spawning six portals, but removing your map after dying once. This just feels awful and even now that I have finished unlocking all of the atlas points… and whether or not I complete a map no longer matters at all… it still feels atrocious. For those not indoctrinated to Path of Exile, there is already a game mode called hardcore that is an optional challenge where you effectively lose your character… or at least it transfers to another league… when you take a death. I do not play in that game mode for a reason.
Runes Are Bad
In Path of Exile II, we lost access to the crafting bench and instead got the rune system where we can socket in an item and gain some additional stats on an item. This is bad for a few reasons. Firstly this choice is permanent, and unlike the crafting bench, you cannot change your mind and put on something more useful when you no longer need that 12% resistance to a single stat. Additionally, 12% just feels like it isn’t enough to matter in some cases.
What I would like to see is a few things. Firstly I would make it so you could socket over top of an existing rune destroying the first rune and replacing its stats. Second I would really like to see multiple tiers of runes just like we had multiple tiers of bench crafts. The game has the reforging bench and should be used more often. I envision three tiers of runes, and each one requires you to reforge three of the previous tiers to make it.
Gold Feels Meaningless
Right now there is not a reasonable gold sink. I feel like lowering the respec costs was the right thing to do, and it should be almost free to change your character. This is something that was unnecessarily punishing players at low levels. Even in Path of Exile 1, you eventually reached a point in progression where you had more Regret Orbs than you knew what to do with, and respecs were effectively free. What gold lacks is something fun to do with it, that you actually care about. Right now the only real option is gambling, and gambling is a mistake… a massive mistake.
What we are really missing is Kingsmarch, because that was the piece that made gold feel good in the Settlers of Kalguur league. Maybe this is eventually something that is going to be implemented, but for now, it feels just as useless as gold felt in Diablo III, where it was just a number that constantly went up and that you had nothing really to do with it. What I would love to see is some additional vendors added to the game that sell a limited stock of items for gold. For example what if you had someone similar to POE1 Tujen that sold random currencies and you could haggle with them trying to get the price of gold down? There just needs to be something fun to do with it.
Most Maps are Not Well Designed
One of the hallmarks of Path of Exile 1 mapping was that it had a lot of really great maps. While everyone pretty much universally loved some of them, there were various niche maps that other folks loved and were perfect for specific builds. For example, I love Toxic Sewers, but that map is going to suck for any build with a lot of damage projection. The problem that Path of Exile II has is that almost universally they are filled with super tight corridors with way too much collision forcing you to get hung up on things constantly. The maps themselves are also massive in scale and take way too long to complete. There are a handful that are great, but because of the meandering nature of the endgame… you are constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils while figuring out how to path around. Vaal Factory can die in a fire.
Mapping is KinDA Boring
Right now Path of Exile II mapping suffers from the same problem as the Last Epoch monolith. There just isn’t enough interesting stuff going on in the maps. Partially this is due to the fact that we do not have over a decade’s worth of league content infused randomly into the maps. However, it is more than that. Right now it feels like the only mobs in the entire map that matter are the half-dozen rare spawns. Once you have killed those, there is little to no reason to keep clearing the map. They are legitimately the only mobs that have a reasonable chance of dropping anything worth picking up. Occasionally you can get maps dropped from white packs, but nine times out of ten these will be a map that is at least 10 tiers too low for you to actually care about.
Rarity is Mandatory for Fun
Related to this last point… right now it feels like Item Rarity is a mandatory stat for you to stack to make mapping feel interesting. This means EVERYONE is magic finding 100% of the time, or feeling like they are making no progress. I feel like this stat needs to be removed from the game entirely and come up with a more creative way to add it back in. Maybe rarity is a sliding scale, which can solve the one multiple portals thing. Maybe maps start out with a high base rarity and that drops each time you lose a portal. Rarity exists on the Atlas tree and I feel like if they buffed that slightly they could remove it entirely from gear and the game would be better for it.
Item Drops Don’t Matter
One of the points that Jonathan stated repeatedly in interviews is that they wanted to make it so that loot on the ground mattered again. This is a goal that they have entirely failed at. Loot for the most part is just as bad as it ever was in Path of Exile 1, the main difference is we are getting way less of it and as a result have a way lower chance of ever seeing anything that is worth picking up. I thought maybe the Tiered loot system that they introduced would be something similar to the “well-rolled” concept that some of the league mechanics in Path of Exile 1 awarded. For example in the Settlers mechanic, you wound up getting some extremely solid drops with decent resists and stats that you might actually care about. I’ve seen a bunch of Tier 5 drops in maps, which is the highest tier in the new system of drops, and almost all of them were worthless. Most of the pieces of gear had zero resistances, which is effectively a requirement in this game since resists in general feel so much harder to get. The best loot in the game appears to be on the vendors because they seem to actually be generating loot with that well-rolled formula.
Crafting is Not Crafting
Right now it feels like we have the Duplo version of the crafting system from Path of Exile. I was by far not a crafting genius, nor did I think it was great that you were effectively required to use Craft of Exile to figure out how to make anything. What we got instead is a total crapshoot where quite honestly… if you don’t end up with the two best stats you can possibly get while it is still a magic item, it is not worth progressing at all. Crafting is effectively picking up a bunch of bases, throwing a transmute and an aug at it… and if you did not hit the jackpot you throw it back on the ground or vendor it. For the average player I do not feel like it is really a system worth even engaging with unless you are being masochistic and rolling the Solo-Self-Found lifestyle.
Greater Essences are Unobtanium
We were sold this vision of being able to use essences to guarantee two stats on an item, and that this was going to be part of the common crafting routine for players. Essences spawn fairly infrequently in maps and the campaign, and when they do… you are very unlikely to get anything but lesser essences which require the item to be white before you start. In my entire time playing Path of Exile II I have seen a single greater essence. I polled my friends who are also playing and they have each gotten one a piece.
There are a few things I would like to see changed with the system. Firstly I would like to see Lesser essences changed so that they can be used in place of either a Transmute or an Augment, aka they will add a single stat to either a Normal or Magic item. Similarly, I would like to see Greaters changed so that they will make a magic item a rare and add an affix, or work like an exalt and add it to an existing rare item. This is going to make the guaranteed stat that an Essence can provide way more valuable because you can use them on an item that already has some potential. Next similar to my suggestions about Runes, I would like to see it so that you can reforge 3 Lesser Essences into 1 Greater Essence of the same type. This means that players can actually work their way up to crafting with Greater Essences rather than hoping on the one-in-a-million drop.
Six Links are Harder to Get than they were in Path of Exile
Another thing that we were told repeatedly, is that the design of Path of Exile II should make it much easier for folks to reach their goal of having multiple abilities as six-links. This is a lie. Greater and Perfect Jewelers orbs just don’t really exist. I’ve not seen a single Five Link, and I sure as hell have never seen a Six Link. Similarly, I have seen streamers who can seemingly get Perfects but have not seen a Greater and therefore still are using Four Links on everything. It would be amazing if you had a system already in the game that was built around combining things… and getting higher-tier things. You guessed it… I would once again love to see them use the damned Reforge Bench to let us combine 3 Lessers into a Greater, and 3 Greaters into a Perfect.
Use the Reforge Bench for Almost Everything
Similarly, I would love to see this concept carried forward into pretty much any place where it would make sense. Do you have too many level 14 Uncut Gems but need a level 15? Bam through the magic of the reforge bench and the standards that have already been set out with way stones… combine 3 gems to get a gem of a higher level. If they add other tiered systems in the future… then bam… make them work through the reforge bench. Hell, I would even love it if they added in Recombinating Rares through the Reforge Bench. Was it too broken to make binary choices as to which stats got kept in the final product? Probably… but it would be way harder to game the system if you required three input products. It just gives players another thing to do with the rares that drop on the ground that are not good enough to actually use…. which are most of them.
Give us the Chinese Auction House
I know this is a big ask and one that will not be given… but trading feels worse in Path of Exile II than it was in Path of Exile. The currency exchange pretty much reset my expectations for how trading should work, and now I would like to see this carried forward into other aspects of the game. Buying things from players is awful. This morning I tried to buy a level 19 Uncut Spirit Gem because I had not found any yet and was getting tired of waiting. I had to message 30 people before I finally got one to respond. The Chinese server already has instant trading, where the item is pulled from the player’s stash and given to you. Make this a thing and make it cost gold… giving us another reason to earn gold. POE1 trade is something I am fond of… but it is a fucking mess and incomprehensible for anyone new to the game. All of my friends reach a point where they cannot seem to progress their builds because their gear sucks… but they refuse to cross the line into turning into a proper trading degen… but also have no problem using Auction Houses in MMORPGs. It is time to move away from this nonsense and just give us a system that actually works well.
Energy Shield Feels Mandatory
Right now the only defensive layer that actually feels good is Energy Shield, and this is in large part because it exists on the tree. Energy shield is different from all of the other defensive layers because it is effectively a replacement for player health. As such by removing health from the passive tree… and quite honestly watering down all of the other defensive layers… the only really viable way of playing in the endgame is to invest heavily in Energy Shield. The answer is not to nerf Energy Shield… though I know they are probably going to do precisely that as soon as they get back from holiday break… the answer instead is to buff the other defensive layers so that they actually feel like a reasonable option. Armor right now is royally fucked, and so is Health and Life Regen. Recoup works fine, but is not enough on its own… and Block while great is entirely too fucking cumbersome and requires picking up every single node on the tree to make it viable.
Build Diversity is Bad Because Classes Feel Bad
Playing as a Warrior felt reasonable enough… until I felt what it was like to play the game as Infernalist Minions. Similarly, yesterday I talked about Alkaiser’s change in religion once he stopped playing Warrior and switched over to Invoker. Essentially there are four builds right now that feel good, and as a result, the players who are sticking around are migrating to them. This is not that these are wildly overpowered builds, but instead just the type of gameplay that people want to play. I fear that they are all going to be nerfed into the ground, when the opposite approach should be taken. Look at what these classes are doing and what makes them fun to play, and then start reworking and buffing the other classes until they can do the same thing. Stampede Explode actually felt pretty good, but was due to a bugged interaction… maybe you should have made that bugged interaction actually a thing instead of fixing it.
Give us Old Ambush
The current state of stongboxes is awful. Instead of popping the box and getting a bunch of spawns that you can clear in a few minutes… it starts this annoying timer causing waves of mobs to spawn in the vicinity eventually leading to a rather anemic amount of loot. They are just not worth doing in their current state because they both take too long, and are way the hell too unrewarding. Strongboxes in Path of Exile 1 are something people actually try their best to add into most Atlas strategies because they feel like this tight little dose of dopamine and are actually fairly rewarding. I have no clue who dreamt up this change, but it needs to be reworked entirely.
Decouple Trials from Ascendancy
I feel like Trial of the Sehkemas and Trial of Chaos are perfectly fine optional content. However I feel like they should not be required to ascend your character. Sanctum was deeply polarizing and favored specific types of builds, and I feel like Sehkemas suffers from all of these problems. Similarly asking a player to do four floors to get that last ascendacy is asking them to commit to potentially a multi-hour gamble instead of what felt like 10-15 minutes to get through a Labyrinth. Trial of Chaos just needs to be deleted honestly… but I can see how some players and some builds might like it. It similarly feels miserable to do. The Ascendancy is a big part of the player identity and I feel like it should almost be free. Right now the Trials feel like the Dungeons in Last Epoch, something you do exactly once before moving on with your life and realizing there are far better uses of your time.
Dodge Needs Phasing
So the changes to dodge roll are better, but I still feel like dodge rolls need phasing. Mob collision is not fun, and especially awful given how claustophobic a lot of the areas are. Ritual for example always seems to spawn in the worst possible places giving you a tiny corridor to fight in. I took a death this morning just because I had no way of getting through the wall of mobs around me, and my minions were being blocked by geometry. It just feels super bad and at least having phasing on dodge roll would help a bit in these scenarios. In a perfect world I would remove all mob, player, and minion collision because none of that is enjoyable in the least.
Atlas Progression Feels Bad
One of my favorite things to do in a Path of Exile League was to slowly work my way through unlocking the 115 out of 115 map nodes. Each time I cleared a new map with its bonus objective, I got what felt like an immediate jolt of possibility as I was granted points to shape my endgame Atlas. Right now the entire process of progressing through the Doryani tiered quests just feels bad. Like I see how you end up in this scenario… you had 115 maps to clear in Path of Exile one, so dividing this out into 10 per white map tier, 8 per yellow map tier, and 6 per red map tier for a total of 120 maps seems equivalent. The problem is the player agency and benefits of your effort… really are not felt at all until you reach red maps. At a minimum you have to slog through 10 completely unrewarding tier 1 maps before you get any points to spend, and then only have two to do anything with. I know they purposefully paired down the Atlas tree to 30 points, but right now it does not feel good in the least. I am not sure what the answer is, but this is not it.
Do Unique Maps Exist? What Biome is this Map?
I’ve cleared a bunch of maps at this point and have purposefully branched out into a bunch of directions looking for additional content and have not stumbled onto a single unique map yet. More than that I have only actually found one hideout thus far. On the other hand… I have seen over fifty copies of the Augury. I feel like maybe there needs to be some work on that randomizer. Additionally I would love it if it were easier to tell immediately by mousing over the node what biome it belonged to. Like if you find a Crypt in the middle of a grassland… is it part of the Grass biome? I have no clue. I should be able to know that information just like I was able to immediately tell what biome I was in during Delve. I mean they have this information, so it should just be a matter of presenting it to us.
Citadels are too rare and as a result valuable.
Honestly this is a problem that I had with Path of Exile 1, but I am seeing it play out again in Path of Exile II. Right now it is too hard to find the Citadels that are required to summon the pinnacle boss, and as a result… when I do find one… I am absolutely going to sell the token that it drops because it is not worth the risk of attempting the fight as compared to the potential value of the item on the trade market. I also sold invitations in Path of Exile 1, because it just was not worth my time to take the risk on the fight that might not even drop anything I can use… when I can just sell the item and get currency that I can in turn buy the item I wanted. I feel like this is not the calculus that GGG probably wants its player base to have, but by making invitations annoying to farm… this is the reality that they have created.
Boss Maps Need Reworked
So when GGG talked about boss maps and them being a bit rarer… I pictured that it would be a map that was just a boss arena, and then have a much harder version of a campaign boss that you fought that would then be more rewarding. That is not at all what they ended up being. Right now I would love to see these changed so you just spawned into the Boss Arena and that the Atlas tree buffed them significantly. Give them a new pool of loot that they can drop or have it so there is a guaranteed chance of getting a decent unique from them or something like that.
Give Normal Maps the Steamroll Bosses
Isolating the bosses in their current state to ONLY be on boss maps feels equally bad. I would like to see the current version of map bosses shifted to just appearing in every single map, and leaving them at their current power level. One of the things that POE2 lacks right now is the player agency that POE1 had, and I feel like further separating bossing from mapping is going to benefit everyone. Mapping should be a chill time, and bossing should be the more sweaty tryhard experience. The people who care about challenge and difficulty, are the folks who chase uber uber pinnacle bosses. Let the rest of us have reasonable chill and predictable mapping.
If We Can’t Have Custom Tabs… give us affinities.
The current state of the game and all of the various currencies that used to have custom tabs in Path of Exile 1, that no longer do… is a bit maddening. By far the worst of these offenders is the lack of a map tab. I know custom tabs require a lot of work, but in theory the affinities that you already had coded should require less work? If we can’t have the proper tabs yet, please at least give us the ability to set up tab affinities so that we can quickly shunt loot into the bank without flipping between a bunch of tabs. Right now loot management feels awful, and please GGG throw us a bone here.
Remove Tower Maps
Conceptually I like the idea of Towers, and honestly I have enjoyed using them to buff the maps in the vicinity. I don’t feel like they are the ideal replacement for scarabs but I am willing to roll with it. What I do find maddening however is constantly needing to waste a map on running the exact same tower layout over and over. In an ideal world you would remove the tower map entirely and just make it so that pathing to a Tower unlocks it and allows you to begin using it. There is nothing interesting about the process of running this same map over and over, but unlike a lot of the voices in the community I don’t necessarily hate the Towers themselves.
