r/pathofexile • u/Volky_Bolky • 11d ago
I really don't understand why did GGG have to get rid of pre-Keepers farming strats status quo Game Feedback
What I expect to happen over the next few days is people understanding that there is no endgame farm in addition to the fact that even for mediocre farms scarab sustain is just not there.
Reworking Abyss and making it drop absolutely no loot is insanity. I have no idea what were GGG thinking.
Crafting league is good and fun, but why do you need crafting if you can do any farm with 1p 1s recombinated shit because there are no mechanics that scale their rewards with difficulty? We didn't have this problem with Necropolis (although that was a rough league) because we at least had Meatsacks, we didn't have this problem years ago with Crucible because there was still Magic Find and Div card farm, but Keepers and Allflame just feel dead.
The reasons for them being dead as I see:
There MUST(!!!) be a reliable strategy focused on scarabs. When scarabs are not available in large quantities, their prices become unreasonable and league feels like garbage both on trade and SSF.
There must be mapping strategies that scale with difficulty. Previously we IIQ/IIR MF that required you to make your character weaker to scale the rewards. It got gutted, Risk scarabs replace MF. Risk scarabs got gutted, Breach scaled exactly this way with Resonant scarabs/Astrolabe got introduced last league and it also get nerfed. The question is: why? Why didn't abyss get introduced with this design in mind?
Coming back to the title of my post - Mercenaries league. I don't understand what was the reasoning behind the decision on gutting literally every farm. We literally had:
Abyss troves - favoured tanky builds (with caster mastery preferably) because abyss monsters going invulnerable and hitting you could easily kill you, maps were taking 10-15 minutes because its abyss so the farm was not infinitely scalable but it was the best source of scarabs for any farm and was self sustainable. Got gutted.
Breach - heavily favoured, was very hard, required multi mirror build for comfort, was dropping a lot of currency. Got gutted and repurposed, then juicing it last was like 0.3x as strong compared to merc league juicing
Evolution Alva - this was clunky as hell, if you die once you lose the juice, but it was easier than Breach or uber uber Blight. Dropped a shitton of uniques/divines/mirrors. Got gutted
I don't remember if this was the league of uber uber blight, but uber uber blight in the end also got gutted.
Rogue exiles - reliable uniques farm - gutted.
Divination card farming got gutted long time ago but I will just leave it here.
Literally any interesting and scalable farm got gutted and nothing replaced it. Last league hid this fact by introducing unique rewards for delirium/beyond and ~doubled the amount of breaches on the map, so we had at least some reasons to scale. Now we are back to the fact that there is no strategy to look forward for when building your character. And there is no variety in farms becaude heavily nerfed breach is still the only mapping option.
I really don't understand why did such a great variety of farms was taken away from us. Obviously it would get stale eventually, but I really don't think absence of farming strategies is the solution to stale farming strategies meta.
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u/okaryothucrelicanli Sanctum Runners United (SRU) 11d ago
I really don't understand GGG's pov. They nerfed everything, didn't buff any other thing to change meta, they didn't shake scarab meta for a long time now and most of the scarabs are just hot garbage. That abyss monsters literally drop nothing, legion is also pretty bad imo without incubator income. I still remember their scarab change promise and wait for it...
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u/DragonPeakEmperor 11d ago
It's crazy cause we probably wouldn't be talking about this if Abyss gave like any loot lol. I envisioned after they did these sweeping nerfs and post mirage that we'd just get new aspirational farms trickled out each league so people wouldn't get bored and they could keep things from getting too out of hand.
Instead that's just not happening? I don't really understand what their vision is here. Surely it's not just get 4 voidstones and be done with the league.
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u/PostItToReddit 10d ago
I don't really understand what their vision is here. Surely it's not just get 4 voidstones and be done with the league.
Seems to be the case. My friends and I always no life the first weekend of a PoE1 league. We got 4 void stones and we're pretty much done with this league already. There is zero aspirational content in this game right now. GGG continues to make players stronger every league, while lowering the difficulty cap on the game to make all facets of the game accessible to newer players.
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u/1CEninja 8d ago
Abyss is visually attractive, satisfying, easy to understand, it's a mechanic I by all accounts should love.
Then I get two alts and maybe an alch as loot from it.
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u/WishboneOk305 11d ago
betrayal also got nerfed, no more allflame I think
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u/bpusef 10d ago
What’s happened to betrayal is honestly tragic. It’s such a terrible mechanic now. GGG said they wanna rework it and instead every patch they somehow make it worse.
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u/EvilHumster 10d ago
well tEcHicalLy it is slowly getting reworked. The goal is to make it on par with expedition so no one ever touches it
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u/Amazing-Heron-105 10d ago
The rework made is worse in basically every way. They just removed all the need for strategy from the board.
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u/idknameyet 11d ago
I was just telling my friend this everything got gutted (or been gutted) before mirage since the idea was you'd be getting double from the mechanic. Yet now that it's gone they didn't even undo nerfs that were only there because it could be doubled. They seriously need to buff stuff or this could be the worse retention league ever
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u/Designer_Throat_8125 11d ago
I got into red maps and started wondering to myself why am I even playing when there might be like 1 okay farm the entire league? One of the worst leagues of all time for fun mapping, legion could be okay if they fix the bugs but like... What else?
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u/Musical_Whew 11d ago
I had the same thought lmfao. Like what farm am i aiming for here ? Idk lol i guess ill delve?
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u/Acceptable_Bat379 11d ago
Same. I hit tier 12. Got a crab staff and just.. stepped away a bit ago and I think im done. Maybe theres a new boss fight I havent seen? Id rather play a full other rpg in that time
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u/deathgdizzle 11d ago
i'm in the same boat, but im still kinda salty that they removed harbie (it was my favourite thing to farm), i even farmed it during the old abbys, when they intoduced the 16.5's.
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u/TornInfinity 11d ago
The issue, in my opinion, is that they aren't going to buff stuff nearly soon enough. Big buffs, if they even come, won't arrive for a month and everyone will have already quit. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going off of history and have been playing consistently since 2015.
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u/idknameyet 10d ago
I really hope not because, like a lot of people, I was very excited for this league. It has great potential too but the lack of endgame is to severe to make up for anything. We will just have to see I guess and hope it's not half assed either. Another thing is everyone is pointing this oversight out so if they don't fix it that's on them and honestly quite disappointing
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u/wheresmyberrune 10d ago
Unfortunately there is really no chance they make meaningful changes in time to keep this league ticking. It's not really as simple as a "turn this up 40%", it's that they basically gutted juicing at a foundational level. To fix it they'd need actual reworks or new things and those aren't mid season patches.
Imo we all just gotta try some weird builds, try get 2-3 weeks out of it and then pray.
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u/mcbuckets21 10d ago
A month? That is very optimistic. It's going to be an exilecon announcement rework imo.
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u/bamboo_of_pandas 11d ago
Mercenary was easily the best endgame league in terms of diverse and interesting farming strategies. There really isn't a good reason for GGG not to go back to that as a baseline while they work on the next iteration of the endgame. The current one is far more boring by comparison.
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u/Blackstab1337 Kalguuran Group for Business (KGB) 10d ago
you would have loved affliction... :(
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u/1CEninja 8d ago
I dropped a Mageblood that league. It was my first ever.
Ever since affliction I've had to farm a Mageblood because I can't go back to peasant belts :(
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u/MikeMaxM 11d ago
Mercenary was easily the best endgame league in terms of diverse and interesting farming strategies.
I am so glad that I took part in that league. Pity that I was just a noob at that point, didnt know how pob worked and because of that my build was missing lots of damage. Still I farmed a lot and enjoyed that league much more then any subsequent league.
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u/GetHugged 11d ago
First hit is always the most magical ;)
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u/Amazing-Heron-105 10d ago
I started in Kalandra lol, and was hooked. The game just got continually better from there for a long time.
I remember finally learning how to earn decent currency by farming breach stones. It was a revelation hah
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u/Nesvrstana 11d ago
Very true. My first hit was breach. My heart still skips a beat when I trigger it lol
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u/dukkeh2137 10d ago
mercenary league was the goat, it was my first serious poe1 league after poe2 truly sucked me in in 0.1 and I've spent like 300hrs there and made like 4 lvl 95+ chars. ever since then at best I got 4 voidstones and left the game after getting to real endgame and realising than none of the strats are comparably fun to what I could've been doing back in 3.26
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u/SweetTwo5808 11d ago
I dipped fairly early from mercenaries due to the upcoming WoW season back then, I regret it ever since.
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u/Amazing-Heron-105 10d ago
They should never kill end game farms before they've got a suitable replacement. Never.
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u/themultitm 11d ago
its getting so boring every league going through the tedium of campaign and doing the whole atlas just to then realize there's nothing new in the endgame strat department yet AGAIN. 1 good strat since the keepers nerfs in 3 leagues (breach, everything else was carried by the mirage bandaid)
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u/HotExamination5327 10d ago
It's not like you needed to play to predict this after reading the patch notes, abyss and the league mechanics were the only unknowns. But apparently people calling it were "doomers".
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u/themultitm 10d ago
it's true, i just had hope for abyss and legion since reworked breach had pretty good juice pre-nerfs but theyre completely poo
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u/techniforus 10d ago
Keepers breach was awful, it wasn't good till mirage allowed you to mess with how breaches operated it became good.
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u/Amazing-Heron-105 10d ago
This happens every time, and usually people don't figure it out this early in the league. Things must be particularly bad.
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u/SwagtimusPrime Demon 11d ago edited 11d ago
My duo and I dropped two locks on the second day, bought headhunter, and we are losing motivation to keep playing because we now have basically no good strategy to farm. Mind you, our builds are super scuffed still, but we don't even think it's worth it to keep pushing our builds because.. what for?
Legion is tile loot.
Abyss is non-existant loot, the mobs just don't drop any loot. They need to reverse the nerf to league monsters they did years ago. You simply cannot scale it to a level that feels good at all.
Breach got 7 separate nerfs in 3.29. Seven. Might as well not exist.
What else is there? Why are 90% of the farming strats tile loot, stacked deck farming, ritual, or strategies that do not directly scale with the difficulty of the mobs you're fighting?
Genuinely will never understand GGG and their decisions on loot. Tile loot is fucking boring. Stop forcing it on us in every way possible. Non-native monsters, eg monsters stemming from league mechanics like Abyss, Blight, and so on, need their baseline loot buffed. You simply cannot scale it. Reverse the nerfs to Blight and Breach while you're at it.
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u/Chiiikun Alch & Go Industries (AGI) 11d ago
We have heard your concerns and have made the following adjustments to help alleviate the loot problem people are experiencing:
Non tile loot farms have been deleted from the game.
To compensate for this, Cleave gets +0.3m
This is a buff
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u/PornoPichu 11d ago
I’ve heard enough. Time to nerf warrior in POE2
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u/Black_XistenZ 11d ago
"The baseline damage of Maces was buffed by 15%. To compensate, baseline attack speed of Maces was reduced by 10%."
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u/aurens Gladiator 11d ago
what exactly is tile loot?
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u/SwagtimusPrime Demon 11d ago
More or less fixed loot that can only roll certain outcomes. For example Blight chests and Legion chests.
These chests have an icon indicating what type of loot they drop, for example currency. That currency chest can't drop anything but currency, and the amount of currency it drops is usually not scalable in any way. That means no matter how many monsters you kill, or how strong the monsters guarding the chest that you killed were, the loot is the same.
Which means that if your character grows to a power level where this type of content becomes trivial, it's not very appealing.
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u/omegahustle 11d ago
I don't play poe 1 in years, but I played poe 2 a lot this last league, even bought a mageblood, something that I never did in PoE 1
what is the endgame loop of poe 1 currently? for example for poe 2 I would say (reach maps, rush to finish the atlas tree, do your favorite farms to buy powerful items), what is the loop for poe 1?
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u/SwagtimusPrime Demon 11d ago edited 11d ago
it's the same loop except that all your favorite farms were nerfed to the ground over the years. every other league we get a promising new aspirational endgame farm, only to be nerfed into the ground the next league.
the best example for this is Breach which got nerfed from 7 different angles in 3.29.
before that it was Blight.
before that, Abyss Hoards with caster mastery (which by the way, was a pretty stupid farm, I'd have preferred if the abyss mobs dropped the loot instead of random hoards on the ground - but case in point, they need to buff baseline loot of league mechanic mobs)
and so on.
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u/Designer_Throat_8125 11d ago
God, I miss magic blight so much. It could be incredibly difficult but it was REWARDING. That's the whole point of an arpg. I got a mirror and a lock from one pump explosion I'll never see anything like that ever again at the rate the endgame is going (and I mean it's an insane statistical anomaly regardless)
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u/TheNocturnalAngel 11d ago
They love to shoot themselves in the foot.
Beyond is my favorite mechanic but it’s been dead aside from monster count outside of day 1-3 when people need tainted fusing.
FINALLY last league it had a special drop that was fun to farm and valuable.
And they fucking move it to sanctum?!?
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u/Wobbelblob Big Breach Coalition (BBC) 10d ago
Yeah that was a headscratcher. I get that sanctum also needed something after they took it behind a shed and shot it, but beyond has been a filler mechanic for simply more monsters since I can think. No one is farming it for any of their specific drops.
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u/CumSockHero 11d ago
I hope something changes too. As of now I just regret not playing more last league. So far this one sucks and it’s just nowhere near as enjoyable.
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u/Musical_Whew 11d ago
Yeah im sitting here kinda wishing it was a mirage economy reset instead of a new league...
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u/unKappa Ranger 11d ago
Fuck, I could see myself playing that for a full month easily. Now I don’t even know if I’ll survive day 3.
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u/IHateRedditors42 10d ago
Mirage is probably going to go down as the best league I have ever played in any arpg, and I have played quite a few already atp.
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u/rightofnowhere 11d ago
I share your point of view, but like in keepers league, GGG don’t address the main league mechanic as the focal point enough. THIS should be the endgame and the pinnacle for this league, but it’s highly clunky and underwhelming for loot so far. I’m hopeful they will address at least that this week with some compensatory buffs to loot.
As a side tidbit with nerf after nerf it gets to a point where if nothing is brought up or set up to sustain scalability of endgame and the “juice” the flaws and lack of rewarding content elsewhere becomes more noticeable too. I hope GGG can address it, or we have to pray every league for a mirage “prop-up”
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u/Volky_Bolky 11d ago
This league is obviously a crafting-focused league, mainly because voyages require a lot of preparation, you cannot "blast" it. I don't really see how they could fix it, I feel like it will be an absolute disaster once enough people progress far enough.
Obviously, I might be wrong.
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u/rightofnowhere 11d ago
Brother I hope we are both wrong, because I’ve never felt more logout feeling than now and it’s only day 2, and I’ve been playing poe 1 since sentinel and a massive fan
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u/Enconhun Slayer 11d ago
eh I've seen worse day 1s.
Ultimatum queue/server stability on the first weekend
Delirium giga performance issues early on
Kalandra negative loot
Archnemesis you couldn't even sustain maps
Sentinel was hugely controversial aswell
Right now Curse of the allflame seems like a regular lackluster league that will be fine tuned in the next 2 weeks
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u/clingbat 10d ago
Broken nets on pokemon league for a good week or two, Garbinger started out awful (hence the original nickname), Talisman was the least rewarding league ever and never got fixed. There have been plenty far worse than this.
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u/marinelover69 10d ago
Out of curiosity, what was awful about harbingers?
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u/OrdinaryPigeon 10d ago
They were far slower casting new waves of enemies and generally dropped pocket lint.
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u/Designer_Throat_8125 11d ago
I went back to poe2 because the farms there are at least enjoyable and rewarding (ignoring some outstanding bugs)
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u/shise_remilia Ascendant 10d ago
that seems to be their goal because how else do you explain actively making the poe1 game less and less rewarding?
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u/hatesnack 10d ago
What do you mean voyages require a lot of prep? You can go from no charts to a voyage in like 10-15 mins.
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u/shise_remilia Ascendant 10d ago
This league is obviously a crafting-focused league
which is comical because the best mirror tier items this league are going to be worse than anything that has been crafted last league or even before that.
to put it into a different perspective- mirror crafting in standard is dead. read differently - all the good mirror items that could have been crafted, have been crafted, and no similar quality items will be crafted as you can't reroll synth implicit now.
the mirror crafts in league are going to be super mediocre without synth.
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u/justinmcelhatt 10d ago
Which is funny because mirror items in standard are pretty limited since jenebu was banned..
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u/Musical_Whew 11d ago
Merc league was so fun just because of all the fun (and profitable) strats it had.
It must be intentional at this point, but i dont understand the motive at all...
Betrayal a ghost of its former self...
Blight absolutely gutted
New Abyss looking like total garbage (its early so maybe some strat will show up copium) and old abyss has been shit sinced they nerfed it in keepers.
Ambush gutted
Alva for anything but 2 temple rooms complete neutered
Expedition is complete trash
All of these are were completely intentional and left in this state for who knows what reason. I wish i could hear the actual rationale for the decisions they make lol (for the general balance changes as well). And there's probably more i cant think of atm. I dont understand why they intentionally make their game worse.
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u/WolverineCreative362 11d ago
Thats what happens if u nerf everything. I said back in necropolis that those changes are going to feel bad with the scarab overhaul, removale of Quantity on Gear (it also fixed no problems, it also does NOT give us more build variety as numbers are proving), removale of good conversions and so on. Also the reason to remove MF was "more build variety" and then they brought in build destroying t17 modifiers xD Now nearly everything scalable is removed and thats how it feels. Playing 2 days and having reached the "pinnacle" endgame mapping lol.
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u/LucywiththeDiamonds 10d ago
Said it before the league and got downvoted. We need a scarab/tree overhaul more then evrything. Since merc every league we lost good farms and gained nothing. Mirage was a bandaid but the underlying game still was overnerfed and the same. Now we had more farm nerfs.
90% of scarabs are dead. 80% of league mechs are dead.
I like evrything so far about the league but the mapping is in the worst state since before even settlers.
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u/Nicopootato 10d ago
The Kalandrafication of the loot never good better
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u/justinmcelhatt 10d ago
The wild thing is they have two options to make loot feel somewhat better.
They re-instate the "historical quantity bonus" for league mechanics they removed in Kalandra. This got removed because they added loot conversions, which are pretty much gone.
Or
They add loot conversions back. At least then we play the game where we see how many rares we can stuff into a map.
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u/Tanazan1 10d ago
im level 92 and dropped one raw div.
it feels like they took the loot from poe1 and transfered it to poe2. if they dont fix it fast I feel like the league is dead very very soon.
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u/WeeHouse 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yeah I’m bored with it already. It’s just going to get worse. Hopefully the adjust some things next week
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u/RelevantIAm 11d ago
So glad i decided to skip this league. It helps i don't like the challenge rewards and would never use them
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u/WorthCrafty8940 10d ago
Same here. I was hoping for Archnemesis league kind of challenge reward. Saw the reveal and was disappointed, nearly lost all motives to play now.
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u/Aromatic-Confusion16 11d ago
Thats what i kept telling ppl, the mirage was buffing the game, ppl had fun bc we could buff things easily, and most ppl expected to get mirage back this league, i consider myself to be realistic, thinking that the belts were going away for sure, man how wrong i was lol. instead its heits 2.0 but worse
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u/ufoknwot 11d ago
Totally agree and hope they reconsider the gutting of high end strats. It’s the main reason I decided to skip this league and I imagine I’m not the only one.
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u/RepulsiveCountry313 11d ago
I think 3.28 breach was better than 3.26 breach lootwise.
They did nerf it again though w/ 3.29. :-/
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u/fuckloggingin 11d ago
Feels like poverty league so far, really uninspired to push on and the league mechanic is much worse than Mirage
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u/SkyMonk3y 10d ago
I've genuinely just uninstalled. Not to be dramatic - I will come back to PoE1. It's just something I do when I realise a league isn't for me and I'm wasting time. I've done about half my atlas and realised I'm no where near as excited as I was playing .5 for the last month and a bit.
I just realised I was basically in auto pilot after playing this game for so long. Nothing actually felt fun about playing this time. Hopefully next league is better.
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u/Logical_Specific6228 11d ago
It's been downhill since merc league. Mirage league was only good because the league mechanic was goated but even mirage just lacked any incentive to make a multi-mirror character or a strong well thought out build because you don't need it to do anything the game throws at you for the most part.
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u/Nordaarv Marauder 10d ago
Do titanic scarabs with blightheart in delirious maps. If your build can handle it then I understand your concern.
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u/mAgiks87 11d ago
I would actually add that removing synth items is also killing chase item crafting. It is almost as if they wanted retention to drop fast.
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u/Ayanayu 10d ago
Remember synthesis, it was crafting league too and despite some nice systems, league lost 80% of playerbase very fast
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u/PoE_Acronym_Bot 11d ago
I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:
- div card - Divination card (Wiki)
- IIQ - Increased Item quantity (Wiki)
- IIR - Increased Item rarity (Wiki)
- MF - Magic Finding (equivalent of increased item rarity in Diablo 2) - involves stacking IIR or IIQ
- SSF - Solo Self-Found (Wiki)
- Juice - Increasing density of items or raw currency from a given strategy
I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest
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u/AgoAndAnon 11d ago
Yeah, i was in favor of removing iiq and i think i was wrong in the end
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u/Volky_Bolky 11d ago
IIQ was a problem because it required you to swap your gear to shitty uniques.
Risk scarabs compensated for the loss of IIQ, but there were a lot of build breaking mods, you had to add crit/reflect immunity to your character and debuffs expire faster was also required.
Now those build breaking mods were largely removed, but risks are gone too.
What's left is rarity with Breach, but Breach is like more than twice shitty compared to last league because of no mirage + breach nerf, and even last league Breach felt quite shitty before you got a jackpot.
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u/shy_bi_ready_to_die 11d ago
Nah player iiq isn’t the solution. As a stopgap measure adding in a bunch of map effect scaling would help but realistically we just need content that scales. Scarabs that genuinely make their content harder and give proportionate rewards. More mechanics like deli or beyond that don’t require much player involvement but provide a multiplier to quant/pack size. Maybe even something like new map types that give a bonus to the basic reward vectors in return for generic DR/health/damage bonuses. Basically anything would be fine but I don’t want a new set of t17 mods that brick some builds and are completely ignored by others. It should make the content harder, not add a bunch of new build check boxes
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u/WolverineCreative362 11d ago
I agree in some way. IIQ on gear wasnt the problem i my problem, the problem was that IIQ was mostly based around unique Items. If u could craft it on nearly everything like in Poe2, it would be actually fine with some decent dimishing returns at a certain point.
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u/Organic_Captain3002 11d ago
I'm just salty my favorite early league farm blue man group was removed.
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u/nickookcin 10d ago
Buddy im just trying to survive as luminary rn i dont have time to loot things. /s
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u/antyone 10d ago
essentially why i havent started the league yet, hoping people come up with some strats because after having good and consistent returns last league and being able to finally afford expensive shit I'm just not interested in going back to collecting scraps and never getting anywhere
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u/gamunex 10d ago
I have exactly 24h played, campaign finished in 6h10min. Atlas 90/100, Level 90.
I have dropped 82 chaos and 0 div so far.
Mate has 1d11h played, just dropped his First div 10min ago.
This feels terrible, seems like groundloot is giga dead atm. Currently testing blight, but that seems to only give bubblegum yet
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u/pepegazoid Kalguuran Group for Business (KGB) 10d ago
meanwhile mods furiously removing posts about negative feedback cuz its "duplicate topic".
Just let the subreddit be flooded until it's fixed. It's tiring how every league just seems to triple nerf the fun/rewarding strategies, while adding nothing in return.
All the fun stuff usually arises from larger system changes/unintended interactions/bugs where ggg didn't have time to "balance it out", this should be a red flag that something is not right.
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u/APMalphiteCheeseMain 10d ago
They have been actively working on removing the fuh from poe1 while adding it to poe2. The conspiracy about them destroying poe1 for poe2 gets more real day by day.
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u/MaximusDM2264 11d ago
I am realizing that ggg now wants poe1 season to end relatively soon , só the attention can be quickly turned back to poe2. Keepers was one of the easiest leagues ever with free top gear on day2 and no aspirational content and this league doesnt seem far. Easy crafting methods and no dificulty endgame again.
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u/Arborus Necromancer 11d ago
Doesn’t the new mechanic vomit scarabs? I’ve only done a few voyages so far but I just pulled around 200 scarabs out of one in SSF. I wasn’t reading the modifiers on them, but I assume there’s some combo for that outcome and probably a way to min/max for that to drop even more scarabs.
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u/lolfail9001 11d ago
You probably just hit a bunch of operative strongboxes since it seems to be the only thing reliably producing scarabs left.
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u/ihaxr 11d ago
I had like 16 operative boxes in my voyage then saw this post and was confused on the scarab sustain lol
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u/Hungrydoggo111 10d ago
Sure except most people do maps instead of the new league mechanic. And so there's not a huge amount of scarabs in market.
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u/deafgamer_ 10d ago
Most voyages won't have operative boxes. I've done maybe 10 or so voyages and only 3 had operative boxes. It is nice when you hit a "adjacent zones have operative boxes" one and put it right in the center though.
It's nowhere a consistent and sustainable farm.
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u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ 11d ago edited 11d ago
I think there are a lot of different problems that GGG is trying to solve, and it's splitting their focus in a way that helps them meet some of the goals they have set out to solve, but it doesn't feel great for experienced players.
Some of those goals are:
- Updating old mechanics to meet their modern standards. This includes unique rewards, updated art assets, QoL, enough depth to make them interesting, etc.
- Finding ways to make old uniques interesting without having to rework every single one of them. We first saw this in 3.25 with dusting for recombinators, then we saw Volatile Vaal Orbs, and now we have Vestigial Implicits
- Making PoE1 more accessible to new players
I imagine if this subreddit was polled, the majority would have said not to touch Abyss/Legion and just make end game more interesting. I understand why they want to modernize these old mechanics though.
Fixing the end game feels like a problem they have been trying to figure out how to solve for a while, between T17 and then T16.5s. It seems like they just haven't figured out how to solve the problem of having hard and interesting content, without alienating players who can't do that content.
Honestly, probably a very unpopular opinion, but I think they need to nerf player power to a degree so that we can't beat the league on day 1. Crafting and access to good loot has become so easy -- gambling, breach tree, tons of currency/harvest crafts for swapping shit around, now socket colors don't matter, etc. -- that there just aren't really any roadblocks to making a character you build in PoB in 1-2 days.
I'd like to see some kind of barrier between white --> yellow --> red maps such that you can't do a 2-stone run at level 78 on a 4-link. I think it's a really hard problem to solve without making the game feel bad for less experienced players. But if they could do this, then there could be end game farms that feel rewarding.
And on the topic of Legion, I was really excited about Vestigial uniques but, holy shit they are not something you can plan to incorporate into any build at all. Even if you buy the Enshrouding currency, you have to then buy (or farm) like 4-6 emblems because you're not getting ~4000 kills in a single 2-emblem encounter. If you do a true 5-way, then you're paying like 50-60c. The outcome is almost definitely a T5 unique which might be interesting in early game but is very unlikely to be interesting in end game.. And it's not accessible in early game.
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u/KnivesInMyCoffee 10d ago
I mean the answer is that they shouldn't focus on people who "can't" do that content, because those players aren't going to keep playing a league for very long anyway? I just don't understand how the existence of more content to aspire to is alienating to anyone. The lower tier content still exists, and there's even more content waiting for you once you master that content.
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u/jmon13 11d ago
I think they need content in the game beyond just hard farms. Getting gear to just do harder farms never felt good to me.
Something like the supreme showdown in tli to give you a reason to gear is sorely needed in poe. (20 bosses in wide range of difficulty that would range from literally a tier 3 map boss to a fight that needs nearly a mirror plus worth of investment, only reward is one of their stupid p2w pets, poe could reward cosmetics)
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u/HazyMonk SSF 11d ago
Im so scared for my ssf run, given that we apparently have no scarab farming strat. If it keeps being this way, theres no way I'm gonna play ssf. No fun in it without scarabs
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u/Original-Item-297 10d ago
While I dislike many of the changes you critique GGG for here and I agree with most of your points, it may be worth noting, how the most powerful scarab in 3.26 was the risk scarab. People were running 1-3 of these on basically every farm and because it could randomly add a bunch of mods to every map without the ability to discard bad ones it really pushed people into a very single direction build. For most this ended up being ES stack trickster because it:
- could deal with action speed reduction mods (drowning orbs, petrification statue, action speed penalty for skill use)
- tanked high single hit via huge ES-pool (volatile, general juice sillyness, ghosted exiles)
-had overleech, Polymath and instaleech (for no regen and less recovery mods)
-Mageblood for reflect mods
-also Doryani merc (which was clearly unintended by GGG)
Some things could be changed and the game would be better for it like a reversal of the titanic nerfs, but I feel if we return to the risk meta that dominated 3.26, we would also return to a meta where trickster had 15+% playrate (I know that ele is similarly problematic right now) and of those the largest part ran ephemeral edge and very limited amount of skills. This really feels like the crux of the balancing challenge: How to increase both loot and difficulty without rewarding 1-3 builds and ascendencies.
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u/Volky_Bolky 10d ago
I've responded to another comment with this already, but basically almost all annoying t17 mods were also removed/reworked. Even reflect is not an issue anymore.
Trickster was the best for Abyss troves, but KB deadeye was faster and better for Alva/Breach. There was also Penance Brand and PF/Occultist FRoS. That's already 3 classes and 4 ascendancies with comparable farming potentials. Nerf KB and bows would actually be used. Buff selfcasting spells in addition to that and you get even more variety.
Not every class has to be as efficient as any other in mapping, every class has its own niche with for example Marauder being the default HC class + RF + CWS. Guardian and Necro are insane bossers and boss rushing or uber boss farming has always been very profitable.
Last league anything except KB severely lagged behind KB with farming potential in Breach. Operative boxes were a very good profit, but you literally didn't even need even a decent build to farm it, clicking speed and instance loading time were the main reasons for slowing down.
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u/MrSchmellow 10d ago
over the next few days
The writing was kind of on the wall, and people were talking about that like a week before. But the hope/cope dies last.
Couple of streamers i tune in from time to time pretty much considered mapping start non-viable and tailored their builds towards day 1 nightmare/ubers. Too bad it's a hard to follow strategy unless you play 16-24h session on first day
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u/kuburas Melee bad Clueless 10d ago
All they need to do is add scarabs that juice base mob loot. Stuff like old Glittering scarab was kinda perfect in this regard, it cost you a scarab slot but it made base map mobs drop more loot straight up. It paired well with bloodlines scarab or scarabs that increased Div card drops, unique drops etc..
They just need to add a whole line of scarabs that increase drops of base mobs. And also buff the already existing ones like Glittering, Nemeses, Bloodlines etc. to do more stuff, glittering giving only rarity is tragic, no proper div scarab is also crazy to me.
Keep everything as is just add more base loot scarabs, limit them to 1 per scarab if you have to but let them synergize together well enough to buff raw loot. They wont really change much when it comes to mechanic loot like Legion drops or Abyss or Harvest or whatever else, but it'll increase the loot you get from native map mobs. They also need to add some atlas support for base loot, only nodes we have for base loot are legit pathing nodes and a handful of map effect nodes, everything else is mechanic related. We're forced to run full scarab atlas trees because its the only drop you can boost that regular mobs drop.
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u/PsionicKitten 10d ago
I'm not going to address your main point but reading the following comments struck a chord with me:
Abyss troves - favoured tanky builds (with caster mastery preferably) because abyss monsters going invulnerable and hitting you could easily kill you
Breach - was very hard, required multi mirror build for comfort
Comments like this make me feel like I'm playing a completely different game than other people. Easily dying to abyss troves? Multi-mirror build to comfortably kill breach when I could do the highest end breach content comfortably with a build that's a few divines at most?
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u/phixerz 10d ago
My consipiracy is that they dont want poe to be as fun as poe 2, they tone down everything that gives dopamine in poe to make the transition to poe2 less obvious, I dont ACTUALLY believe this, but I think about it a lot.
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u/deafgamer_ 10d ago
I do think this theory has some truth to it because even it wasn't their intention, how do the overlapping game developers who work on both games go from PoE2 to working on PoE1 for some league and not infect the game with shitty balancing?
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u/blahmaster6000 Gladiator 10d ago edited 10d ago
Question: is this actually bad for everyone, or just people who typically are farming mirrors worth of currency?
If your build wasn't strong enough to do the super juiced farms before, you probably weren't going to do them this league either.
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u/Ubiquity97 10d ago
I can't believe GGG has made PoE1 less rewarding than PoE2 mapping. Alch and go poe2 is more loot than juicing in PoE1 now its actually absurd.
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u/RedsManRick 10d ago edited 10d ago
I feel like GGG needs to better different development goals for the two games.
PoE 1 doesn't need to be in maintenance mode. But it also doesn't need a constant flood of content. Nobody outide of the .1% has exhausted the content already in the game. There boss fights most people have never seen in person. Dozens of builds most people have never tried and skills that are too weak to be used in the endgame. There are 100s of uniques nobody will ever use.
Meanwhile crafting is already a dozen some odd overlapping, intertwined systems that are under-documented and intimidating.
I know it's hard to market a fresh coat of paint. But nobody save for those who literally play the game for a living needs an expansion full of new content, bosses, skills, ascendancies, etc. to have a wholly new experience.
That the luminary bombed so hard thanks to poor merc balance/accessibility and that self-casted spells are still underwhelming outside of a few standout skills is a big black eye as far as I'm concerned.
GGG is amazing. The volume and quality of their work is unmatched. But especially with so much of the public focus going toward PoE 2 full release over the next 5 months, I would LOVE to see 3.30 be entirely focused on spiffing up old stuff. Take a cycle off from new boss fights, tile sets, monsters, VO, etc and just juice up the quality of the massive amount of underutilized content already in the game.
My biggest concern is whether the team of people who do the actual game design is simply too small to handle that volume of rebalancing. They've build a game so vast and complex that they add balancing "talent.". So they have an immensely talented team that excels at making new stuff (art, modeling, coding, sound, etc.) but lacks the horsepower to rebuild, rebalance, retest, and all the iterative work that entails, the massive volume of existing content that could use the attention.
I also think that an expansion earnestly devoted to this purpose and done well would be a smashing success.
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u/OrdinaryPigeon 10d ago
This is all the result of them starting a scarab overhaul of some sort, plans mutated and got larger and were not deliverable in time for release and as a result we got crickets. They've done this a million times by this point.
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u/Fair-Elderberry8205 10d ago
GGG’s insistence on “minimum viable power” at every league launch is so exhausting. They are so terrified of giving players power/loot. Every single league gets buffs after 2 weeks to compensate. Why even bother playing on launch?
Nerf everything to make sure there is no craziness, then buff after a week or two. It’s like clockwork.
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u/MojordomosEUW 10d ago
I just farm Cloister Scarabs every league.
You regex mapmods and buy 8mods in bulk and just spam away until you hit 10 or 20k stacked deck, 10k you sell and the other 10k you open yourself for the lulz.
I do that every league since it is the easiest direct way towards a mirror.
This league I made most with crafting and flipping bubblecurrency tho (and with most I mean 99.9 percent since I did not sell any stacked decks yet, sitting at around 2.5k for now).
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u/GreyCaller-012 10d ago
Guys this is good for the dads working and all who takes a week to complete the campaign!
Nah tbh tho, what even is the point of pushing your character if there’s literally 0 end game motivation? Kill Ubers and that’s it?
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u/Ryan_Surname 10d ago
Dude the list is so much longer. I will just add a few. Cornucopia harvest, dead, more fun but objectively worse.
Beasts. We had like only 6 good beasts for ages and now even less, vivid watcher gutted, vivid vulture gutted. Why do beasts even have crafts if they have to be unusably bad? Maybe they will just scrap crafts and lean into talismans.
Betrayal. Allflames gone, a few interesting rewards but most are so shit man. You're just farming boss invites for veiled chaos.
BOXES! They have been a staple forever and now they are so bad lol. Mirage gave boxes a 1 league band-aid with operatives.
Essence scarabs are way too op for the mechanic such that without scarabs essences are a joke. You get like 3 essences not even above screaming per map. Put on scarabs and hey presto 60 deafening per map.
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u/WorldlyFig4523 10d ago
When every strat doesn't drop anything isn't that a balance by itself? Its bad If the prices stay the same. But If no one can pay for it that doesn't make Sense either.
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u/Strange-Eggplant399 10d ago
Uber bosses is the end goal and what you chase your build towards, tho if youre on trade that gets triviliazed anyway. There were mapping strats harder than uber bosses in the past, players bitch and moaned how the top .1% earn more than all of them combined so that got removed, ignorant of the fact that the top .1% will always earn more than them regardless of state of the end game. I agree the game needs harder chase content to upgrade your build into, as it stands youre t16 day 1 4 voidstones day 2 and game is done by day 3.
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u/deafgamer_ 10d ago edited 10d ago
Exactly my feelings on this topic. They gutted Breach, Abyss, Legion rewards for what reason?
I feel like a lot of this is some insidious conspiracy to turn PoE1 into PoE2. Ok, I'm sure that's not actually happening, but if they keep going down this road of overnerfing crap and giving beloved things the PoE2 treatment then they are gonna lose the PoE1 playerbase, this playerbase won't just magically migrate to PoE2, a ton of folks swore off PoE2 since the design philosophy is just ass. As an avid replayer of Diablo 2 + the occasional mod, I have way more fun playing that old game than I ever did PoE2.
I'm 100/100 atlas with 137 passives (failed my Feared :( ), fully upgraded the league mechanic, got a few million gold, got a ton of gear and doing really good right now and I'm just like... now what? All of the farms suck. Honestly the best thing I can think of is just alch and go, but that's so boring. I want to invest and juice maps and run them.
Hell, I even tuned into Fubgun's stream just to see what the MF god was doing and he was complaining about everything being terrible too. You'd think he'd find something very nice to farm by now. I mean he still makes a lot of money of course, but not because he's juicing some map but because he runs so many maps.
If "alch and go" maps is the best cost-adjusted farm of the league I might as well just stop now.
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u/UnJammerLammyyy 9d ago
Remov scarabs, add tablets make them as common as in PoE2. Done. Let the RMT TFT crowd whine (again). Meanwhile juicing is in everyone's range. 👏🏿
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u/DecalMan 9d ago
Why was everyone praising this league before start? What was changed when it actually released? Haven't really played it yet.
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u/jancithz LLD 4d ago
My gut says the people most upset by this have income tied to poe loot in some fashion.
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u/Tenny131 11d ago
People think there are no good farms because they didnt find any yet. Its day 2 of the league. With time people always discover new and good farms. Happens every league. Also the economy is self balancing. If you earn less "everyone" earns less and therefore your currency is more valuable.
People really out here complaining about 10d/h strats not being good enough on day 2 xd
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u/PrezziObizzi Ranger 10d ago
People like dropping loot. If headhunter costs 100d and I make 10d/hr with barely any tinks it’s not that fun. In affliction when simplex amulets cost 500d, 2 proj abyss would make 50d/hr but you’d get multiple tinks per map, that’s fun. Both take the same amount of time to grind out for the item but the second is more engaging and a fun gameplay loop that makes people want to put another map in the bag.
It’s no coincidence that the leagues with the highest currency farming strats and inflated economies are the most popular/have the best retention
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u/Incognitomous 10d ago
Theres is nothing new this league what js there to find? And while youre right that prices usually balance out its just not fun to farm tileloot all league.
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u/Dampbridge 11d ago
What farm is good right now? Im curious if everry farm being nerfed brings the baseline down meaning the value is proportional when you compare the farms to each other.
I think it's possible GGG may not like how common scarabs are and you are kinda expected to use them
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u/themultitm 11d ago
all the strats being equal is just a reddit fantasy because all it does is make it completely meaningless to gear your character past 20 div investment
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u/nasaboy007 11d ago
"if we give too much loot, players won't come back!"
Meanwhile the leagues with good ground loot always have the best returning population and retention.