Prophecy Challenge Statistics

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Sure_K4y wrote:

The RNG has indeed been weighed to some degree. As far as I am concerned, there still is something left to be desired. Eventhough I have 2 lvl 90 characters at this point, I still get stuff like "kill rare x/y) for uniques, quite a few kill monster x with weapon/item y equipped (upgrade prophecies), and generally pointless stuff like frogs/rats which pretty much represents the "least worst" prophecies. Also, I still get the "ambitious bandits" chain quite often. So, as far as the lvl 90 bracket is considered, it is more like a mystery to me, that I am still hoping to experience for myself. This far I can safely say I have exceeded the realms of "poor RNG", for that matter...

I still consider "kill x Rare for y unique" and "kill X unique with item equipped" rewarding prophecies. You get a free unique or an upgraded unique.

Also, if you do it right, you can spawn rats/frogs inside a map that has rewarding divination cards, giving you an extra chance to spawn that card. It's a great way to farm Cair Blaid, for example, which has a divination card for Rigwald's Curse and that card ONLY drops there. Plague of _ might as well be an IIQ modifier for maps. It's not unrewarding at all. If you know how to take advantage of it. It's how I got my Cursed King card, in fact.

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Sure_K4y wrote:

I do not see how that would have anything to do with the appreciation players have for the content in question. Let alone that quite a few players are already annoyed be the "harcore-lite-experience" that comes with the lord's labyrinth. If you start gating parts of the new content behind a HC only league, you will end up messing with the "casual-oriented playerbase" which not only represents a large part of this community in terms of pure numbers, but also does the "heavy-lifting" in terms of supporting GGG by laying down money for MTXs. While your argument might be true to some extent, in regards to getting challenges done, it has little to no effect on the actual appreciation of the content that comes with the leagues.

I have to agree here that gating certain content behind Hardcore would not see increased amounts of player satisfaction. I am not sure if I was part of the minority or the majority in this, but I've been here since before 4 month-now 3 month-leagues were a thing. I hated it. Not because I was restarting every league, no. But because certain content was gated behind Hardcore/Softcore. Remember Anarchy? Of course you do. Rogue exiles were awesome. They are still awesome. Do you remember what the hardcore content was that released with Anarchy?...

No?...

Of course not. Onslaught felt like a joke. For several 4 month leagues I felt like Softcore got all of the cool toys, while Hardcore always got the shaft. Anarchy, Invasion, Domination all introduced cool new content. Our most interesting Hardcore one would have to be Invasion. Which I feel like I'm in the minority for enjoying, since it was a RIP-fest league.

We won't mention the cancer that was Beyond.

With the introduction of Talisman, Perandus, and Prophecy, I feel like GGG are moving in a much better direction. They can pool resources to focus on a single temporary league, increasing its value. This also has the benefit of not separating HC/SC content.

Although I'm still giving GGG the stink eye for gating Rigwald's Curse talisman behind Softcore; while content wasn't league-specific, certain uniques were. At least we have a divination card for it, now. And modern leagues don't gate unique items by league.

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AbdulAlhazred wrote:

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Sure_K4y wrote:

The RNG has indeed been weighed to some degree. As far as I am concerned, there still is something left to be desired. Eventhough I have 2 lvl 90 characters at this point, I still get stuff like "kill rare x/y) for uniques, quite a few kill monster x with weapon/item y equipped (upgrade prophecies), and generally pointless stuff like frogs/rats which pretty much represents the "least worst" prophecies. Also, I still get the "ambitious bandits" chain quite often. So, as far as the lvl 90 bracket is considered, it is more like a mystery to me, that I am still hoping to experience for myself. This far I can safely say I have exceeded the realms of "poor RNG", for that matter...

I still consider "kill x Rare for y unique" and "kill X unique with item equipped" rewarding prophecies. You get a free unique or an upgraded unique.

Also, if you do it right, you can spawn rats/frogs inside a map that has rewarding divination cards, giving you an extra chance to spawn that card. It's a great way to farm Cair Blaid, for example, which has a divination card for Rigwald's Curse and that card ONLY drops there. Plague of _ might as well be an IIQ modifier for maps. It's not unrewarding at all. If you know how to take advantage of it. It's how I got my Cursed King card, in fact.

The aspect of something being rewarding or not might be subject to the eye of the beholder, but this is a fairly clear cut case:

Backtracking to get a unique with a net-worth of 1c is *not* rewarding when I can simply run a map in nearly the same amount time, and get even *more* currency out of it, plus the xp, plus higher ilvl rares, plus additional maps. If there is any exception to this it would be the tabula prophecy, especially if you can vaal it to +1, or getting a high rolled pair of facebreakers, which very rarely -if ever- happens.

If you run higher tier maps in the t12-t15 vicinity, this is also true for *most* of the upgrades you can get for certain uniques, the most noteable exception here would be upgrading to a voidheart, which again is a fairly rare prophecy to get in the first place. That being said, the actual reward of these prophecies is questionable at the very least. I think it is safe to say that currency wise these prophecies do not necessarily hold their own against straight mapping, in terms of time spent/money earned ratio. Running uber lab/uber atziri puts "grinding prophecies" to shame just about every single time, if done properly.

As far as the frogs and so on are considered, these rank among the least worst prophecies. The problem arises if you are planning on getting something like monstrous treasure to proc, and instead end up with rats or frogs, because these prophecies get in each others way, as in: Only one of them be active at a time. Let alone that the timing of prophecies actually proccing is also a matter of RNG.

When looking back at peradus or talisman it is easy to see the difference. Both talisman and perandus did not create a need for players to go out of their ways, these leagues basically were a companion piece to the overall progression through the game, rather than working against it. In this respect these leagues did a better job than prophecy does for quite a few players.

Don't get me wrong, if you get prophecies to align with what you want to be doing, they are great, however the sheer spectrum of possibilities, even from lvl 90 onwards, is too huge, and littered with pointless things, to feel cohesive with the regular gameplay more often than what I would consider to be bearable. This might come across as if I wanted something like a "standard+ variant" of a league (which could be applied to any league that existed so far, though), which is not what I'm trying to deliver here. I like variety, but I like variety done right. As soon as the variety draws me away from the more important things it is done wrong in my opinion.

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AbdulAlhazred wrote:

After an update, prophecy rarity is now based on character level and what difficulty you are in. A lot of the backtracking ones, or generally "useless" non-rewarding prophecies will not be given out after you hit certain level brackets. I'm 90, for example, and haven't had a single prophecy given to me that wasn't rewarding in some way. The closest ones that come to 0 reward are the ones where I kill a monster and it turns rare(shot at rare/unique items), or I kill a rare monster and it spawns a tormented spirit (shot at rare/unique items and currency).

So just wait for it. Save your coins for Merciless difficulty.

Thanks! Will do, already saving many since I can't use them faster than I collect them, which is a good thing for sealing away ones I really don't want later.

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Sure_K4y wrote:

The RNG has indeed been weighed to some degree. As far as I am concerned, there still is something left to be desired. Eventhough I have 2 lvl 90 characters at this point, I still get stuff like "kill rare x/y) for uniques, quite a few kill monster x with weapon/item y equipped (upgrade prophecies), and generally pointless stuff like frogs/rats which pretty much represents the "least worst" prophecies. Also, I still get the "ambitious bandits" chain quite often. So, as far as the lvl 90 bracket is considered, it is more like a mystery to me, that I am still hoping to experience for myself. This far I can safely say I have exceeded the realms of "poor RNG", for that matter...

Message receive: RNG is still random, lol. Hopefully I'll experience more of what AbdulAlhazred did instead of what you did.

Once you achieve level 90 and complete that challenge, I think GGG should change it so that you never get the more worthless prophecies. You're already at end-game, so why waste time on junk?

Any ways, thanks for the end-game insight in Prophecy. :-)

i have 34 completed so far but im probably like many others that dont bother completing the rest atm until the leagues almost over. that said i could go for 40 pretty fast

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cipher_nemo wrote:

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Sure_K4y wrote:

The RNG has indeed been weighed to some degree. As far as I am concerned, there still is something left to be desired. Eventhough I have 2 lvl 90 characters at this point, I still get stuff like "kill rare x/y) for uniques, quite a few kill monster x with weapon/item y equipped (upgrade prophecies), and generally pointless stuff like frogs/rats which pretty much represents the "least worst" prophecies. Also, I still get the "ambitious bandits" chain quite often. So, as far as the lvl 90 bracket is considered, it is more like a mystery to me, that I am still hoping to experience for myself. This far I can safely say I have exceeded the realms of "poor RNG", for that matter...

Message receive: RNG is still random, lol. Hopefully I'll experience more of what AbdulAlhazred did instead of what you did.

Once you achieve level 90 and complete that challenge, I think GGG should change it so that you never get the more worthless prophecies. You're already at end-game, so why waste time on junk?

The issue is not that RNG does what it does, the issue is the "event horizon", for lack of a better term.

Obviously there are balancing concerns in play here. If you get a guaranteed chance-orb success, or a guaranteed 6-link every couple days, it sure would be somewhat nice, but it would also be something that does not provide that satisfying feeling that you otherwise may have had. With that in mind it clearly makes sense, that, no matter your level, there will always be "filler prophecies" which you will want to get out the way, so you can spin the prophecy-wheel-o-fortune once more.

The negative aspect at this point is, that when you put in effort to get these prophecies done to save coins, you have effectively wasted valuable play-time, whereas sealing these prophecies means that you've effectively wasted currency. So, once you get something that you do not want to have, be it because there is no benefit for you, or be it because it is detremental to your progression, or be it because you're missing a key item, you're in a lose-lose situation.

This lose-lose situation is where prophecy went wrong from the get-go, and it still does to this day. Even reducing the costs for sealing certain prophecies is not much of a remedy, because a lose-lose situation is what it is, and the player is *forced* to make an uncomfortable decision either way. This is the most outstanding and noteable flaw this league has, and at some point it will start to become annoying. That's not what I'm here for, I don't play to get annoyed time and time again.

In comparison to prophecy, the perandus league had one thing going for it, and that was freedom of choice. If you did not like what Cadiro offered, you could simply move on, without any negative side-effect whatsoever. Talisman worked differently, but even talisman was less progression-intrusive in comparison.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Holding steady at 11... not that I'm trying to get higher. I just play. If I happen to get a challenge completed, says more about the "challenge" than it does about me.

Same here i have just been playing. Not trying to complete anything.

Btw darkshrine league was the best league.

I was VERY happy I didn't like the pet and could just relax after 24 and take a break this go around...might actually be the first "race season" I give a try for a real reward.

It sounds like Prophecy is even more painful than Perandus was; I guess I picked right when I considered how annoying Perandus was versus Talisman.

Also, yeah, looking at that chart... It seems fewer people are trying compared to Perandus. While the EXACT date has shifted, GGG *has* given us a decent look at around a little over a month into each league:


As one can see, there were a substanially higher number of players who hit both 36 and 40 on Perandus, and I doubt that the 36% longer time can explain the ~100% difference, especially when the values for challenge counts 5-12 in particular (where MOST serious players will fall) was actually a lot closer.

I've noticed a few people mentioning that the 300 map challenge is hard to do

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Caer_Blaidd,_Wolfpack%27s_Den

Why not buy a bunch of these?

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ACGIFT wrote:

It sounds like Prophecy is even more painful than Perandus was; I guess I picked right when I considered how annoying Perandus was versus Talisman.

Also, yeah, looking at that chart... It seems fewer people are trying compared to Perandus. While the EXACT date has shifted, GGG *has* given us a decent look at around a little over a month into each league:

Talisman Stats @35 days

Perandus stats @45 days

Prophecy Stats @33 days

As one can see, there were a substantially higher number of players who hit both 36 and 40 on Perandus, and I doubt that the 36% longer time can explain the ~100% difference, especially when the values for challenge counts 5-12 in particular (where MOST serious players will fall) was actually a lot closer.

Those graphs are percentages, not absolute numbers. So the high left side for Prophecy could indicate new players who are trying out the game.

That said, for me personally, after Talisman (32/32) and Perandus (36/40) I'm burnt out. I got to A3 Cruel and thought "Do I want to bother with this any more?" The answer was "no."