What Happened with Items

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CauldronGeal wrote:

rollback to 3.13 Chris and we can be friends

Totally agreed. The best leagues with more retention were Metamorph and Ritual.

Sadly they lost the hand on what players really like.

Edit #2: I changed my mind after playing some more. It's not that bad.

Hmmm where to start?

Archnemesis.

Archnemesis mobs are heavily overtuned. They are not a challenge. They either go down faster than a hooker's drawers, or they kill you in the same blink of an eye. There's about 20+ different modifiers but only a handful offer any real chance at a decent drop. If you don't get one of those special conversion mods the mob is pretty much worthless on every occasion. Archnemesis mobs aren't particularly challenging like a boss is, it's more the effects they have on death that are challenging, or their on hit effects. There's just too much visual clutter from them. Volatiles, toxic orbs, ground degens, lightning effing mirages spawned almost on top of you. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT DEAF PEOPLE PLAY THIS GAME TOO. I don't hear sound cues and rely on visual information. I actually play with sound off as it is pointless to play with it on as I am deaf. So if I cant see what's going to kill me in no time at all I am totally effed. Archnemesis worked really well as a league mechanic but as a replacement for rares it's horrible.
Archnemesis worked fine as league content (apart from the pathetic storage) but it's absolutely awful as a replacement for rares.


Efficiency.

As POE players the way you have made this game has turned us into efficiency machines, running content as fast as possible and repeating it over and over and over again. It's not unusual for a player to run 100-200 maps in a session. Yes we set our passives for the content we like, run that content and exit the maps often. So what? That's us being efficient, the way you have trained us to play by the way you have programmed the game. You might think it's too fast, but it is an ACTION rpg, not a strategy RPG. If I want to play strategic i'll play neverwinter nights or something like that. This game is a full-on speed game. Leagues are only 90 days which to me is too short but to some it's 2 months too long.


Crafting.

Well you've totally wrecked that completely. A game like this very much has a place for deterministic or at least semi-deterministic crafting. Again we only have 90 days to farm currency, make items then finally enjoy our new power. The harvest league gave us wonderful build diversity. I don't even remember there being any particular 'meta builds' as with enough time in your garden you could make just about anything viable. It was this that brought me to POE. The skill tree, the diversity of crafting, the many different skills. However you seen to want a situation where everyone plays one of six to ten meta-builds for a league or three then you nerf those builds and try to make a new meta. Why? Why not go for pure diversity? Ritual league was similar too. Although in that league I never found an augment craft, the fact that I could find one kept me playing. I think I was still playing on the day the league ended. That was the first league I felt confident enough to roll my own build rather than following somebody else's guide. Since then it's been all downhill although I did enjoy the archnemesis league itself. We desperately need back most of those 'filler crafts'. It seems to me your crafting is getting your item editor out and designing what you want. We have to do things differently. We can only use the in game tools you provide, essences, fossils, harvest, the craft bench etc. Have you actually tried farming and making a desirable item in POE 3.19? Anything that can be semi-deterministically made now requires so much more currency than before and often you'll need to YOLO annul items a few times and stand more than a good chance of completely bricking your item wasting all that farming and needing to start again. OK that's fine in an MMO but again this is a 90 day action rpg. We have jobs, and kids you know, we don't get paid to play poe 14 hours a day. I'm lucky to get 14 hours a week atm.


Return on investment.

This was one of the best things again about POE. You could invest heavily in your maps with scarabs and sextants etc and generate profit almost every time. That's gone. The people making money now are not doing it through heavily invested maps. In fact you've totally ruined the return on investment for using scarabs and sextants without a one in ten thousand lucky archnemesis mob poking up. I don't care how you fix this but this like crafting absolutely has to be fixed. I really don't want to play heist for six weeks to get currency. I like heist, but not that much!


Beyond.

Beyond was rather fun I thought. One beyond boss per map now is kind of dull and very unrewarding. Consider allowing more, maybe 10-15 per map. Tainted currency is very niche, and besides you've wrecked that too so I keep reading.


Going forward.

Put the old rares back. Replace tormented spirits with sentinel. Replace rogue exiles with archnemesis mobs and increase slightly the amount of 'rogue exiles'. The problem with archnemesis everywhere is everything becomes archnemesis. Let's be frank, they aren't rare mobs, they are bosses, so treat them like minibosses not mobs to be thrown at us in every mechanism.
Give us back at least semi-deterministic crafting. Give us back those so called filler crafts, they were very important. You've turned all augs into remove non x get x pretty much but they are costed like an old aug was. We absolutely must have a keep prefix and keep suffix craft. Yes you can do this with eldritch currency but that's only applicable to a subset of non-influenced items. For instance you can't use it on rings and amulets or anything with a conqueror, elder or shaper influence.
At the moment every map feels like the one map I have never beaten, the damn hall of grandmasters. I feel archnemesis has a place but not as a replacement for rares. Give us back return on investment but perhaps cut the party quant bonus down to more sensible levels.

So are you going to fix the loot rates or just say "I understand." and not actually make any meaningful changes. If we got loot nerfed by 90% and are at a 10% base loot rate and you give us 25% because thats a big number it still puts our loot at 12.5%. WHY SHOULD I SPEND 6+ HOURS A DAY PLAYING YOUR GAME FOR ALMOST 90% LESS REWARD?

And what don't you get about how huge of a deal this is? Do you want your playerbase to be 1000 concurrent users? Thats where you're headed, a dead, unenjoyable, husk of a once great game. I'll play Diablo 3 Season 27 until you fix your game, and if it doesn't get fixed I and many others including streamers won't be back.

the league is already dead, so that you don’t make the moment already missed. The next league will have the last chance -_-

An amazingly pointless statement filled with platitudes and excuses that does no justice to the community nor addresses other concerns such as the ultrawide changes.

Can someone of your team really play the game by self from A1?

Okay philosophy 1 and 3 are good and tuned extremely poorly, philosophy 2 is bad and creates more outliers where people just have a bad time. Archnemesis actively violates your opt-in philosophy.

How about minions ?

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I… didn't actually understand the impact of the change. It was mentioned to me in passing (that we were removing the league monster bonuses and replacing with just quantity), and I didn't ask any more questions. I was busy, distracted, and should have sought more information. Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere. This is a massive internal communication fuckup and I take full responsibility for it.

You made a mistake, because you were distracted and careless, that caused a large part of your customer base to walk away. A mistake that you've made repeatedly, as we've had these "I'm sorry" posts multiple times over the past few years.

If most of the people on this forum made a mistake like that in their job, after repeated similar missteps, they'd be fired.