Development Manifesto: Legion as a Core Game Mechanic

1.Was a decent league mech (still crappier than breach because you have to waste time on opening the mobs), so glad that it's going core... but once again it will obviously go core as a much less of a version than what it was during the actual league... so we will (even with the sextant and delve etc stuff) have fairly poor access to it.

2.Unclocking the 5th slot is now gonna be expensive af, because as mentioned above... we won't have much access to it...

3."If your build was able to handle it"... meaning "if you had a HH"...

Also why is the first page of any post always a bunch of 1 word comments like "POG" or whatever. Always gotta go to like 3-5th page to start reading real comments where thought has been put into them... instead of the typical fanboy "POG"...

Also can we get some freaking player agency in 3.8 or what? All this master content on the side is starting to get annoying. Why can't we just specalize with 1 master? Also i really hope server improvements and performance optimizations are coming, because the lag/crashes etc have really mucked up this league for many people.

If you read this as an SSF player it basically means they removed Legion content from the game. Which is not that bad, because i did not liked it.

So, this will be a "trade-league only" content too. Giving power to those who have too much already... They will get bored even faster with all that powercreep.

This is awesome news...Tyvm

Hey, to start this off... Is 3.8.0 going to finally update our fragment tabs? It was irksome that, with new loot items that were CLONED from breach splinters & stones... We didn't have slots for them in our fragment tabs. Also, if you plan on adding a 13th scarab type, it'd suck if we don't have spots in said tab to hold 'em...

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Qarl wrote:

We are adding Legion encounters as map content with a 10% chance to occur (similar to Breach or Abyss).

This was kinda predictable, as this was also the shift for almost all "rolled in" content from a league. (though, Bestiary, Incursion, sulphite, and syndicate encounters were adjusted since)

Going with this, and given that it's map-only (I'd have recommended, thematically, some of it in Part II; the idea of "cracking open history" makes sense as an effect of the world changes for Part II) I would recommend that the rarity of factions & splinter drops be rebalanced: currently Maraketh are FAR rarer than any other faction, and less likely to drop splinters. It's been bad enough with one monolith per zone, but with one per 10... Hardly anyone will get a chance to do them.

You also left out that the lack of Maraketh splinters was a consistent complaint throughout the league, too. My solution: make them about as common as Templar are right now, and then, perhaps, reduce their level bonus to +4; this'd also mean that a 5-way Domain of Timeless Conflict would have a monster level of only 83, so it'd line up with the cap in OTHER endgame content (Breach, Incursion, Delve, Betrayal, etc. all cap to level 83) rather than being, weirdly, the one thing we can run that matches The Shaper's Realm.

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Qarl wrote:

Handily, the Legion mechanic was one that could be comfortably integrated into existing game elements almost immediately, rather than requiring a lot of extra work. Thus, Legion can also be accessed through the following sources:

• Sextant Affixes
• Legion Scarabs
• Delve
• As a room in the Temple of Atzoatl

In Betrayal Safehouses, Vagan will give rewards based on Legion, including Legion Scarabs and Timeless Splinters. You'll also find Legion rewards in chests hidden behind walls in the Azurite Mine.

This is actually interesting to see that everyone at GGG pre-planned. Normally, a really bad part of each new league's mechanics is that they kinda supercede every other mechanic; the astute player can often easily tell what order league mechanics were introduced, simply by checking what mechanics were not included in it.

this contributes to a lot of the "content overload" confusion the game has, as it's a pile of tacked-on mechanics. Integrating every mechanic into every other one would go a long way to fix this, and I hope this is followed with a lot of other reworks.

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Qarl wrote:

To that end, we have increased the rewards for the first cycle of monsters, reducing them each revive cycle. Rewards from Legion Generals will not diminish, but the rewards from other monsters will diminish. We will not be adding a diminishing return for experience gained from the ongoing encounters.

This does show that GGG kinda missed the point here. No one was running 5-way encounters for the loot; it was pretty much always a losing proposition that you wouldn't make back your (currently ~3 exa) running a 5-way Domain. People ran it for the experience.

Path of Exile has an ongoing problem that EXP gains are painful... Unless you exploit the latest new loophole added. This was also really apparent during Betrayal, where (then-level 84) Chayula's Pure Breachstones gave insane EXP.

Grinding Gear Games needs to go back and take a look at the whole far-endgame leveling system, and adjust it; because as it stands, your choices are "grind to a virtual standstill doing normal content" or "abuse the hell out of the new league's system to blitz to 100 in a few hours." Neither of these are good.

My broader recommendation: re-adjust the "virtual level" of other difficult content, (It's really dumb that, with how dangerous a lot of content has gotten, you're basically better running white maps instead of red ones; the EXP reward isn't that much less!) while scaling down what we get from "super-special encounters." E.g,

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Qarl wrote:

The basic Legion chest and encounter rewards will largely be the same. Breach rewards will give fewer Breachstones, in part because they were a little too common, but also to keep these two sets of special map encounters separate. We want most of your Breach splinters to come from Breach! Additional Incubators have been added, increasing the variety of rewards they can offer. We enjoyed making Legion. Thank you all for playing and making the Path of Exile community so vibrant. We look forward to showing you the upcoming league in a couple of days.

Yes, there was a serious problem with a lot of other leagues' mechanics being rendered obsolete by just spamming legion content. I'd recommend broadening the loot nerfing to account for some of these serious issues I saw:

• Ascendancy: Making enchanted helms rain from the sky has been... Irksome. It kills part of the reason to run Labyrinth. And yes, these can be usable, since we can just scour the item and craft; this also replaces the point of enchanted fossils.
  
  
• Breach: You're correct; we shouldn't be getting more Breach splinters from legions than actual breaches. Though keep in mind that with Monoliths becoming 10x rarer, this will partly correct it. Also... Full breachstones (let alone enhanced breachstones) should not be dropping here! The splinters weren't so much a problem as getting an enhanced breachstone drop.
  
  
• Harbinger: Even trying to seek out Harbingers (such as using the harbinger scarabs, going for Harbinger zana missions, etc.) I still get far more harbinger shards from incubators and Legions than I do from ACTUAL Harbinger-related content. You should just re-enable Harbingers as part of normal content, especially since you've nerfed the drops of harbinger shards so much vs. Harbinger league.
  
  
• Bestiary: I'm not sure anyone was ever excited to get a drop of an item with a Bestiary mod crafted on it. As a rule, they're just... Garbage. We craft them onto existing gear that's already good. It might be better to just remove those drops, and make Bestiary drops rarer, so all we get are scarabs, filled bestiary orbs, the super-rare unique, etc.
  
  
• Incursion: Legion mobs drop WAY too many items with Vaal Architect mods on them... Remember that normally we get just 2-3 per Omnitect, and none else... We get an average of at least one per monolith! Granted, this might be something where re-working the Temple of Atzoatl to give better rewards would be a good idea too...
  
  
• Betrayal: Between incubators and outright drops, I got dozens of times the scarabs I got than from doing actual syndicate safehouses. This obviously needs to change. Note that it doesn't feel that strange with veiled item drops; these should be kept the same.
  
  
• Other Leagues/expansions: Stuff for Talisman, Perandus, Prophecy, Essence, Delve, and others seem to be fine. Since prophecies are gotten by just spending silver coins, dropping them here might be encouraging more players to run them. Similarly, Delve drops weren't so bad; I actually kinda liked that the lack of resonator drops made delving even MORE mandatory to handle the fossil system.

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boyandroid wrote:

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play the Domain of Timeless Conflict content indefinitely if their build was capable of doing so.

How about the issue of the Headhunter & a certain build that trivialize the whole encounter? So, that certain build can now just spin around the whole content indefinitely?

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Nibelton wrote:

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if their build was capable of doing so.

like this a good thing. this is why i dropped this league after 2 weeks, [Removed by Support].
play ED/Vaal Nova or go suck balls. oh,and headhunter. [Removed by Support]

It really shouldn't have taken 10 pages for someone to mention this. It's not enough that they're adding diminishing returns, they should put a hard cap in place on DoTC to ensure HeadHunter doesn't stay batshit insane.

I'm hoping the fact that DoTC won't be as commonly run means the rewards don't get out of hand, but I've got a bad feeling there will still be people going Flash On Meth fast through it.

Realm of timeless conflict that still has a timer? Hmhm

Legion going core? Not bad! Only 10% as common as it is now, while it takes 2 to 5 times as long as breach stones to gain the emblems for the realm fight? So that's a 5-2% accessibility rate compared to what it is now right?

Diminishing rewards but not on the bosses and no xp reward cut? Guess who's gonna have regular access to it while also being able to profit off of it. That's right: not 99% of your playerbase. It is the 1% traders who buy emblems, run headhunters and mirror gear.

Good job; you made the game's content even more frustratingly out of reach for players like me who don't have a lot of time to play. Still haven't found Aul or 3 out of 4 bestiary bosses either. Imagine making endgame available for everyone and giving people the option to chose which endgame content they run instead of a little bit of all of it. That would be like almost every other popular game and we can't have that now. PoE needs to be played forever, which can only happen if you hide the cookiejar right?

Tl;dr
Legion is fun indeed; don't gate the fun again; there is too much nice content that i can hardly run cause of gating....

i get why you want to keep Legion. But for the majority of the player base they wont get to interact much with it, let alone get a conflict run. And giving Vagan in betrayal Legion rewards is not that great either, since betrayal spawn chance seemed too low to begin with, and now there is a additional thing that can spawn?

Personally i am not sure this is a very smart decision to let go core as it is, you have always believed in freedom of choice for your characters, but then you implement Legion which is probaply the most "shoehorning" league too date regarding good build diversity?

Headhunter nerf when?
More choice in what endgame system you wanna play when?

(And yes this post was alot of negativity, even though i liked Legion overall)

wow cute!!!

very cool

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Motopsycho wrote:

If you read this as an SSF player it basically means they removed Legion content from the game. Which is not that bad, because i did not liked it.

So, this will be a "trade-league only" content too. Giving power to those who have too much already... They will get bored even faster with all that powercreep.

I already wrote a post, but yours is shorter and says it better.