Integrating League Stories into Existing Lore

As someone who loved Synthesis I must give you and the whole team my compliments. ARPG's aren't known for their lore, but somehow, as with all other aspects of POE, you and the team at GGG have made POE the best in the ARPG category. No ARPG will grip me with it's lore the way POE has over the last 4+ years of development.

Im gonna be the only one saying this but .....

bring back talisman upgrading !!!!

Keep 'Day Zero rule' in POE 2 please

Probably unpopular opinion:
I kind of want to see some of the old league stuff go away...

Not very much, really. Specifically, the essences.
I feel like it's a largely unused thing, and that there are so many better ways to craft things now, that it's just too unrewarding to use the small small handful of good essences you collect to get a couple chances at an okay item piece.

I grab every essence I find, and if I were to vendor them to upgrade, I would have 10-20 of the top essences. They just seem so very lackluster.

And using them when leveling is kinda moot, because leveling doesn't take long enough to really stop and think about using an essence on a piece of leveling gear.

I dunno, that's my own 2 cents, and the opinion might be worth less than that. But I just think that the essences have long since run their course.

make zana the most badass boss ever

Great job integrating lore into POE with the new league, loved the voice-work with delirium, was top quality creepy!. I'm super exited for POE 2 and the new lore it'll bring, keep up the great work.

I miss Synthesis..

Bring back Synthesis and its supporter packs please.

I definitely support the concept of evolving the existing content, with the Masters rework in the Betrayal cycle being the most prominent example. Indefinitely stacking on lore is not sustainable (and it's important to note that the same applies to league-introduced items), so something has to go and something has to change. Sure, I miss some of the old voice lines, but it was a worthy trade-off for all the new goodness that came in return.

I would love seeing existing NPCs more involved in the league lore, akin to how you did it with Zana and Synthesis. On this note, pretty much every recent league introduced a new NPC, but is this actually necessary? Could some of the NPCs be reused from time to time? Zana is obviously the main "gateway" NPC in this respect as she oversees all Atlas matters, but maybe something can be done with the others as well. The addition of Kirac in particular seems to hold quite a bit of potential, as his being a tracker enables some narrative space for "discovery" of the new lore. This way newly introduced content can be as much of a surprise to the other NPCs without there suddenly being an expert on the matters that was for some reason completely ignored (read: not existing) prior to the content's emergence.

With regards to the stuff referenced in PoE 2, I assume you're referring to the non-core stuff (referencing Catarina before the first Catarina fight would violate the Zero Day rule). I'd say Synthesis and Harbinger were the most interesting in terms of lore. As for the core ones, I'd love to see Breach and Delve lore explored further. What we know of Breach is limited to the flavor text on Breach uniques and some It That Fled lines. And as for Delve, Niko has mostly been focused on the practical aspect of delving, but we know very little about the inhabitants and history of the mine biomes, especially the lithomancers and their culture. I think both leagues warrant a deeper dive... sorry for the pun.

Would love to see the long term consequences of our choice for ruler of Highgate with some kind of in-game implications.

Also, more synthesis!

-O