Announcing Path of Exile: Blight

GGG isn't a "tower defense game" company and their inexperience will probably reduce the odds that the first iteration released will be a good experience. I know that's not an optimistic take, but I think GGG has earned an initial sense of caution about how this might go.

On that note, if the towers vs mobs relationships are a complex version of "rock / paper / scissors", and especially if the mobs spawning along particular pathways change partway through a blight event, then this league will be an auto-skip part of the game, at least for me.

So you say I have to stay half an hour on each and every fucking map to build and maintain some stupid towers now, huh?

One more league, one more update to the content.

So we have now a tower defense game and a bunch of updates to core systems and classes.

Starting with the woer defense league mechanics. This is a terrible idea. It is very clear the Devs didn't knew what to do and the league was a second thought to all of the background work being done, even so it stands out like a sore thumb.

Firstly the towers have to be upgraded while we are fighting the enemy waves. What does this means? well, unless we are MLG champion levels of APM, we really cannot focus on having defenses always up and running while we are fighting the mobs.

Secondly, where this league seeks to alleviate the problem of content that forces you to stop to do other content, this mechanic forces you to stop doing your map to play a tower defense game. It couldn't get any more anacronistic than this!

For the changes. Again it was misinterpreted by GGG the problem of secondary content (main content is always mapping). The problem isn't so simple as I don't want to do this now. A small part of it is indeed breaking their pace to go do this or that, but that is indeed the smaller part. The bigger issue however is, that people don't necessarely like certain content. Maybe they don't like delve (I hate it almost as much as lab which is yet another forced content with "perma death" mechanic which is also anacronistic in softcore) or maybe they don't like incurson and so on. Well, regardless of when they do it, people feel FORCED to do it because the rewards missed are too good! What people want is not a simple case of choosing when to engage with content but what content to engage with without being punished for skipping certain content. It's good to be spoiled for choice, but only when it's choice and not a do this or you'll miss out!

On a side note since I'm talking about gameplay rewards. It is high time that GGG recognised the deep rooted issue that is the economy in PoE. Yes, the flippers will tell it's ok. They control the market after all. Yes the very good players will tell you it's ok, they make douzens of ex in a day so prices for them literally do not matter. Yes streamers will tell you it's ok, Most of them are on the very good level and many receive plenty of handouts so what do they care? But what above the other 90% of your playerbase? You know, the core that makes you exist in your current state as a very successful company? Fact is, the majority of players can't get a full build because they are too expensive. There is a very good reason why the majority of the playerbase is here for every new league but anywhere from 2 weeks in to a month the leagues start feeling dead as a lot of players leave the game and the market takes a hit due to the lack of item influx which yet drives the prices further up. The average players has 2 or 3 hours to play a day. They are not very good at the game, they are ok, but that's not enough to farm currency for their builds or the next they wanted to try, they may recognise some valuable rares at glance but most won't. An so on and so forth. This needs a solution because right now, PoE is being able to maintain the player base even with this kind of economy. Some people quit and come back like me. Some people quit forever like almost all of my freinds. Some people come in to try a game they didn't knew. For now the new players are what keeps the player base stable and healty, but eventually there will be enough bad rep that people will not even bother to try PoE. It's time to nip this problem on the bud. The answers to this are simple. If all orbs without exception can be bought, you cannot flip currency anymore. If items get tagged for something like a year where they cannot be sold for more than that were bought then items are not easy to flip at all. More importantly this allows you to create a market (not auction house) where people can easily buy and sell stuff which will not mess the economy of the game because flippers ceased to be an issue. Add to this an actually good crafting system where you chose all 6 affixes on the item (at lower levels than what can be rolled but at good enough levels that can get you started in farming) and you got a much better system in play. Reguardless of how, right now, this is the biggest issue (albeit far from the only one) that PoE faces).

And lastly the class changes.

Necromancer gets a revamp, summoning gets another buff. Is it needed? I mean, I guess yes to take care of dumb AI but other than that probably unnecessary buff.

Poison assassin gets a revamp too. Unfortunately it's not gonna be good enough. By good enough what I mean is that poison was cool when you could simply retool any kind of damage into poison. Yes, it caused the double dipping and so on. This will allow for poison to come back... Maybe? But it will be limited in scope. BTW, bleeding is in a worse state than poison... Just so you don't forget.

Mines change... You addressed one core problem which was having to set them at your feet, The other problem is detonation. Why are builds like contagion not popular? Because no one wants to press 2 keys in order to perform what pressing a single key should do! It's not good action economy, the players will ALWAYS feel that it is clunky. Sure you've created a pet that detonates mines. Problem number one being when do you get that pet? is it early? Cause it probably needs to be in the beggining of act 1. More over there is the delay to consider of the pet triggering the mines. If it's instant then that's fine, if not that's an issue because it gives the enemy time to get out of the way. Secondarely if the pet triggers it immediatly and mines now are supposed to get stronger with each consequent detonation, the pet can be a cause of DPS loss. All in all, mines still look clunky as all hell. But I'll reserve further judgement until I see it in action.

And that is it. Another patch, with another forgetable league and good intentions but poor implemtantions as well as a lack of a will to solve the more deep seated problems with PoE.

Will I play it? Maybe, if I do I doubt I'll play for longer than a couple weeks.

Any changes to unveiling mechanics?

At least there's a way to make displeasure over the mechanic known: every time you find a "Tower Defence", just scoop it up and put it in your "do it later" bag and let them accumulate. Since the mechanic will spawn in every zone, it will be very telling when there are people sitting on stashes of millions of "Tower Defence".

this is a shitty game mechanice... but they learned out of shitty synthesis... they will flood us with items again, and think its good

I just wanna say Thank you GGG for doing so much funny expansions for us!
i love love love the work you do to this game! T H A N K Y O U ! <3

Not a very interesting implementation of TD mechanics I must say. I've played a bunch of TDs with very cool twists and/or progression systems, multiplayer co-op or versus.
From what I saw in the Blight League trailer it's showing itself to be very unimaginative. They may as well have a PONG league next where you go into area and prevent balls getting past you.

I'll give it a go but the more I see the more I go meh. By the time we hit maps and have our build starting to take shape most of us will be ignoring building towers and just standing at pump exploding approaching enemies ourselves... I'm calling it now.

IS Remove only stash tab finally fixed?

May I ask what are the

"

systems changes we're not yet ready to hint at (which should improve some areas that the community have given us vocal feedback on (not trade))

mentioned in the What we're working on post?