What's wrong with bestiary? Let's talk.

First of all: I have fulltime job and simply can't spend more than 5 hours in one day on game. Currently I have lvl 92 character, 102/157 atlas completion, 23 completed challenges and a couple of almost completed. I killed red tier Elder and meet Abyssal Lich two times.

And I found only one beast that requared to open portal and fight vs bestiary boss.


Now let's talk.

1. Nets. I wrote this earlier on forum: why you add ten tiers of consumable nets if we use only two of them anyway? Why this not a one, upgradable by quests, infinity net and one consumable rare ultimate net? What is the point? Infinity net to common capture and ultimate consumable net for unique or red skull beasts - it's enough. Also you can make a different ways of upgrades for adjusting capturing process for your build. Right now you adjusting your build for beast hunt. Or use necronets.

2. Einhar Frey. This guy is useless. Seriously, this guy know nothing about bestiary. He don't know even a single recipe, because first quest recipe that you got shows to you after capturing a beast - he just told you that kind of beast you must to capture. He also don't know about where you can find some beasts. Even beasts that have a fixed location, like minibosses in acts. You can replace this NPC with any other and nothing will change. He have no functional besides selling nets and bestiary orbs.


3. Bestiary book. Also useless. One real useful feature provide by book - you can see the name of missing beasts and find on third party resources where you can get them for 'complete the bestiary' challenge. Book can't show to you recipe before you catch a specific beasts. Book have no specific information about where you can find some beasts. I swear many of players don't know about Albino Roa and they can't learn about his existing from this useless book.

4. Beast and recipe tracking. Why? Just why you can't flag up to five recipes and have notification when a required beasts located near you? Just one little simbol 'X' on top of yellow/red skull that already marked on minimap. This is so hard to implement or just nobody think about that?

5. Recipes learning process. Why new recipes shown to you only after you capture specific beasts? How about quest, character level or location level requirement? I mean, you reach t13 map, go into one - at the start of the map Einhar Frey appear and tell you what you can hunt something special in this dangerous place. And recipe for spirit boss will appear and you can track them to not kill realy rare beast by accident. Or your character get lvl 40 and now Einhar Frey tell you about some leveling recipes, before you capture specific beasts.

6. Spawn frequency of legendary beasts. Why they so rare? You really don't learn anything from Abyss league where Lich was nearly non exist? You sure that I meet all four bosses by myself with that abysmal rarity of beasts? Because, you know, beasts that I can buy from another players.. do not count to bestiary challenge!


7. Crafting risks and rewards. Who decided what you must to fight vs deadly beasts in very small arena and get random crap for that? You know that some of the beasts really can nearly oneshot you and not everybody play slayer with insane overleech to 'tank' it? I mean, game have more simple system for get same crap - use alchemy to item and hope that Great RNG will bless you. You can choose specific stat to craft? Yes, essence can do a same things but provide guaranteed amount of stat, not a random 1-6 lightning damage on ilvl 86 gear after fight vs lvl 80 beasts. Most useful recipes for leveling - 4l gear and boots with movespeed. That's all. All other mostly not worth your effort. And things that makes this worse is the fact that even if you make possibility of craft a guaranteed tier of specific stat, depended of beasts lvl - essence will be better and safely. Exception is 'craft a unique' because you can get a specific league-gated gear.

8. Beast gathering. Besides main story - it's fully randomized process, because maps and their inhabitants designed by this way.

"

CEBlais wrote:

Now beast gathering.
If I check a recipe I like, and I need a lot of WhateverBeast. I search, and I know that there are a lot of WhateverBeast in the northern forest. Do I go farm the northern forest just to get them? I don't want to, because I am level 80 and I should be doing maps. But I will never get as many Whatever doing maps because there many layers of random in the way (map drops and monster distribution).
And now, I have a high level beast with the VeryBeasty mod to craft an item. But I don't want to spend my other high level beasts for that recipe, because it makes it harder and is a useless waste, so do I go to act 2 once again to get low level beasts? I don't want to do that.

This is a real problem of beast gathering.


P.S: Yeah, my English is bad, sorry for that. But I must to say something.

UPD: added #7 from the comments.
UPD2: added #8 and few words in #2 from the comments.
UPD3: added my personal final legendary beasts statistic.

Great feedback. I really like your point about Einhar being kinda pointless as a guide. And I agree with how it would be nice to have Bestiary quests to do, or something that made it seem less than just completely random.

You might like to see this announcement about increasing spirit beast encounters:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2114414

"

dudiobugtron wrote:

You might like to see this announcement about increasing spirit beast encounters:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2114414

GGG posted this announce while I wrote my post.
Sorry, I must to use some translator help to make my words barely understandable, so I write not fast enough =/

"

DoEFotGS wrote:

3. Bestiary book. Also useless. One real useful feature provide by book - you can see the name of missing beasts and find on third party resources where you can get them for 'complete the bestiary' challenge. Book can't show to you recipe before you catch a specific beasts. Book have no specific information about where you can find some beasts. I swear many of players don't know about Albino Roa and they can't learn about his existing from this useless book.

Good point. Bestiary is clunky and doesn't give you enough info (in line with the long standing GGG's practice to "outsource" crucial game functionality & knowledge to 3rd party sites). Compare this to Essences, where you have all of them in one stash tab and know exactly what they do. Essence crafting is simple to use, easy to understand and fits perfectly in the fast paced PoE nature, Bestiary does not.

Let's be real, Bestiary will NOT bring PoE back to a slower paced gameplay, because the problems (if they can be called so) lie elsewhere. Bestiary can be completely ignored by clearspeed people and doesn't give enough content & fun to those who enjoy a slower playstyle. That's why it is a failure, imo.

Most rewards of Recipies are Bad. Just B-A-D.
Need be re-designed.

Let's take a example:
https://youtu.be/Yag9zkMmbL8
"Recipe: A Stack of 10 Random Currency"

I unlock this recipe while LV85-88.

Fight 4 beasts for 10 Random currency?
No exp, no other item dropping, just 10 random currency?

Why don't I just trade 2 stack emperor's luck or find arcanist's strongbox for these random currencies?

Most of recipe looks like "Not worth a try" or "Wasting time".

The crafting Recipe is also pointless.
Even it can choose item base now, Fighting 2 rare monster for 1 rare item is still not a good idea.
Essences and Crafting bench are much more reasonable choices for item crafting.

Questions that come to mind for me are

1. Why are many recipes like an essence, only more restrictive? Why not just have more essences instead?
2. Why are many of these recipes not divination cards?
3. Why isn't Einhar a Forgotten Master for essence crafting?

Question 3 for me arises from thinking "Screw the nets, zoo, having to kill things twice, Einhar popping into the game and doing a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, and general Pokemonery. Let us just kill stuff."

My final question for GGG is why out-of-genre mini-games are being pushed into the game. Do they have confidence in POE as an ARPG or not?

Honestly, it comes down to purity of design. PoE is a game about killing stuff. This league needed to be more Monster Hunter and less Pokemon. Just for funsies, I'll put my opinion below.

Legendary beast drop Parts you can use for Stuff. Parts go in separate inventory tab. Take Parts to Blood Altar and Do Things with Them. No more nets, no more capturing. Menagerie is just the Altar. Trade Parts to other players and experience Player Interaction!

Dump all the "Make x rare with Whatever" recipes. Basically, anything you would commonly find on the ground, remove. As PoE players, we're already used to sifting through mountains of crap to find the good, lets not add another layer, thanks.

Really, just those two things would immeasurably improve the situation. Sad thing is, they would've taken less dev time than the way the league was currently implemented. Focus on what PoE is, what people continue to play it for: mowing down hordes of monsters for loot.

"

EnjoyTheJourney wrote:

Questions that come to mind for me are

1. Why are many recipes like an essence, only more restrictive? Why not just have more essences instead?
2. Why are many of these recipes not divination cards?
3. Why isn't Einhar a Forgotten Master for essence crafting?

Well, not being GGG we can only speculate, but the most reasonable (read, "simplest") explanation for each of these is:

1. GGG wanted to experiment with a mechanic like essences, but with different restrictions that the crafting essences .
2. GGG wanted to experiment with a mechanic like divination cards, but with more player involvement in collecting the inputs.
3. GGG wanted to experiment with a mechanic like master crafting benches, but with more player interactivity during the crafting process.

Which, in summation, says this: GGG were interested in trying to find a more player-involved mechanism that worked similarly to these previous mechanics, but that was better for providing players with an overall enjoyable experience more than a button clicking experience.

They also wanted, I suggest, to provide more deterministic crafting than the above: essence provided some determinism, but bestiary recipes cover a broader space of time, and have a less confusing mechanism for selecting what you want to do for new players.

As supporting evidence of this, I tender the change made to scour-and-reroll rare items when you supply the base for the "with X mod" crafting recipes, in response to feedback. That moves it along the goal of encouraging players to - like essences - have more deterministic crafting, but with a better interface, and with more "do things in gameplay" than just "push a button" than older crafting approaches including essences.

Which, I'll be honest, I like. Having to do stuff and getting more predictable results is much nicer than spamming an alt with shift-click five hundred times to roll that pair of jewel mods I want.

Also, yes, you re right. I forgot about crafting risks and rewards.

7. Crafting risks and rewards. Who decided what you must to fight vs deadly beasts in very small arena and get random crap for that? You know that some of the beasts really can nearly oneshot you and not everybody play slayer with insane overleech to 'tank' it? I mean, game have more simple system for get same crap - use alchemy to item and hope that Great RNG will bless you. You can choose specific stat to craft? Yes, essence can do a same things but provide guaranteed amount of stat, not a random 1-6 lightning damage on ilvl 86 gear after fight vs lvl 80 beasts. Most useful recipes for leveling - 4l gear and boots with movespeed. That's all. All other mostly not worth your effort. And things that makes this worse is the fact that even if you make possibility of craft a guaranteed tier of specific stat, depended of beasts lvl - essence will be better and safely. Exception is 'craft a unique' because you can get a specific league-gated gear.

I want to add another annoying thing. If i have a yellow/red beast and they spawn more beasts then it is really annoying to target the one i need.
Personally i don't like bestiary that much and i prefer the orb method and master crafting.