The recurring problem I keep running into every league.

After over thousand hours into this game and very fun league start I keep running into the same problems league after league and they frustrate me every time to the point where I burn out and quit the game.

the game is fun as long as you level up to 92 and get gear in a semi reliable fashion once I hit the red maps through, and the mid to endgame starts the game gets less and less fun and for me the reason are the follwing points.

First xp loss on death. When running maps you get not enough xp to offset the 10% xp penalty staring from lvl 92. That means you need to juice up maps wiht more monsters and more xp which in turn makes them deadlier (and less fun thanks to new map mods and Archnem mods) which also increases chances of dying more often.
So since maps are out of the equation you turn to things like beach stone rotations, 5 ways and other methods that require a lot of investement in currency.

The problem here is said currency has to be gathered somewhere, most often trough maps, that are not really fun to run and endangr oyu losing all your progess to the next lvl bc you have to juice them to make profit.

That leads to a sitatuion in which I get frustrated bc the progression that should be fun turns into a nightmare of fearing to lose hours of investement to a random mob with a bad to see deadly effect or some inconsistent application of a defence system that decides randomly to not protect me this time.

Pls just throw away the xp loss on death. It does not add fun to any activity and only brings frustration for the players.


This leads me to the second point unclear visuals adn degen effects.
It is not fun to die because in the 100 mobs on the screen 5 have fire floor and stand next too you, while you have no chance to see them througgh the rest of the mobs. Same goes for ice floor if there are 50 corpes lying arround you will not see the frost floor that expanded from one killing you in the process.
Degen effects in this game are far too common now a days and last far too long. Nobody wants to wait 30 sec before getting the loot bc the frost effect does not want to vanish or die to one because you tapped into a menu and the effect started ticking 1 sec afterwards.

Pls make these things either clearly visible like the incindary effect with the bright flame or lower the damge so that they dont kill you in 3 secs, or lt dmg reduction apply to them.

Third is reliability of defence mechanisms. If I have 35k Evasion, 100% Spell supression and 100 ailment avoidance aswell as 50% stun immunity. That should make the char hard to very hard to kill. What it should not do is lead to random deaths because the attack that did not hit me 9 times before now suddenly kills me in 1 hit. If I have good defenses I have good defenses and the gameplay shoudl reflect that aka not killing me randomly because my evasion decides to not work this time. Pls make it more consistent so that I can rely on it as surefire defense against even the hardest content.

For example with making armor and evasion do dmg reduction straight up without a chance to fail like it feels currently.

Forth is crafting. I cant deal with the continous gamble city. If I spend multiple exalts into prepearing the crafting gear I want a reliable and deterministic method to finish my Item and get my reward. The majhor proble I see in this game every league is that from a certain point on, for me red maps and first bosses, it stops rewarding you regularly with good items and reliable progress towards your best in slot build. What it does instead is give you items that are not very useable and then make you roll on the offchance to maybe get an upgrade. That is neitehr fun or rewarding.
I thought recombinators are a good solution to that but sadly they are not reliable enough.

So pls fix crafting make it more determinsitic because as it is now it only feels frustrating, when after 2 weeks of continous crafting you still did not get the item you are tying to make.

the fith one is rewadring dropps in mid to endgame. last League I was happy with the new bosses. They dropped really good items that you were able to use to get your char running towards the endgame. This league the dropp chance of the items is so low its unrealisitc to expect anyone to get one and use it in the build. And its the same for other bosses.
I ran guaridans, conquerers, crucibles and synth maps even cortex but nothing dropped anything worthwhile. The 30 Elder gudian maps I run today felt super bad and unrewarding bc not 1 of them dropped any exciting gear or other loot. The chance to get cool stuff, that improves your build is so low for most of them I have no Idea why I even took the note to get 2 guardians, to double my difficulty, because it does not double the rewards or chances to get something exciting.

And thats what frustrates me the most after crafting and losing xp. when I turn on the game there is no gurantee that I get some progression or reward at all today because at the end the chances for that are random and often far too low.

Everything you pointed out has already been debated times and times again but it's sadly very unlikely GGG does anything about them.

As much as i agree with you, what we want is exactly what they don't, so it's probably not gonna happen.

builds should be done at 92-94. a couple more passive points will have very minimal impact on a character beyond here.

pick a point and stop worrying about levelling past that.



the visual clutter, nobody has an answer for.

at 92 you are missing 8 points a bit less than 8 percent power of your character. to me thats a lot. thats a large cluster jewel and stats that you get from level up.
also regardless of that why shouldn't I get xp and level up if I play well? I want to naturally level my character to 100 not do wonky stuff like op describes.
I support what op written here

crafting is gambling
random one shots do nothing but add frustration

also what frustrates me when I play a new skill or try something new is god awful skill gem/socket color system. good god. white socket stuff should be just much more available. the current sydicate 1-3 is just random and takes forever to setup. I usually upgrade my gear faster than I can get 3 w sockets even in ssf... and why is it 3 not 4? let me have fun trying new stuff out like switching auras or skill gems to try stuff out instead every time I get anything I dread the god awful recoloring / linking etc. yes I know about crafting bench jew trick but thats also random unreliable and not engaging.

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Realteveshszat wrote:

Third is reliability of defence mechanisms. If I have 35k Evasion, 100% Spell supression and 100 ailment avoidance aswell as 50% stun immunity. That should make the char hard to very hard to kill. What it should not do is lead to random deaths because the attack that did not hit me 9 times before now suddenly kills me in 1 hit. If I have good defenses I have good defenses and the gameplay shoudl reflect that aka not killing me randomly because my evasion decides to not work this time. Pls make it more consistent so that I can rely on it as surefire defense against even the hardest content.

If you get all of the following you get better survivability:
- Strong phys mitigation
- Good buffer (life) with good recovery
- Immunity to bleed & corrupted blood.
- High chaos resist & overcapped max ele resists
- 100% spell suppression or equivalent
Block & evasion are optional and will help but they arent necessary in the same way the above are. So from the POV of current 3.18 PoE your character description sounds like it has severe holes in defenses.

Note that I dont disagree with your critic of evasion and various other things. But if you want to you can build for better survival.

"

Shaelann wrote:

Everything you pointed out has already been debated times and times again but it's sadly very unlikely GGG does anything about them.

As much as i agree with you, what we want is exactly what they don't, so it's probably not gonna happen.

most poe problems could be reduced to GGG loves quantity over quality

instead of having 654684 monsters that can be killed in 1 hit clutering the screen just to drop items that are 99% of the time trash we could have small packs or single stronger monsters that take a bit to kill and actualy drop something worth picking.

defensive layers are also more manageable when fighting smaller packs for the sole reason one can actually see what is going on and dodge what you know your character can not tank.

smaller packs olso increase the viability of skills, lots of skills are considered bad becouse they cant wipe the whole screen in a second an move on to the next.


same for crafting, on an ideal world crafting means colect materials droped from diferent creatures and bosses, put them together and get the desire item. Meawhile in here for some reason crafting means trhowing currency at a black hole named RNG in the hopes of a good item coming out of it.

I am kinda confused as to how bleed got so dangerous all of a sudden. A few leagues ago, bleed was 'dangerous' but not like instant death deadly. Now it feels like if an enemy uses puncture you might just get bled out within one second. You dont even have time to use a flask sometimes.

The fact that the game basically forces you to find a way to be immune to corrupting blood and bleed both is really bad game design. There should be ways to mitigate this damage without needing to find difficult FULL immunity.

My character is sitting at nearly 80% phys res and i still find myself getting bled out within one second often. Its made me stop playing this league altogether pretty much.

I almost quit before that when i ran into a rare mob with the Treant mod and its pack of treant that were still slightly off my screen all decided to drop bombs under my feet. A green bomb in the middle of the green grass with no real notable sound effect, and then boom, i die instantly, to enemies offscreen. It's not like this is a hard mechanic to deal with. But the fact that it is so badly telegraphed graphically and that they can do it from offscreen makes it feel very unfun to interact with. And thats just one of the many AN mods that are similar. It feels like EVERYTHING just spawns directly on top of you now and/or leaves deadly pools on the floor.
Imagine trying to play a channeling spell right now. Try standing still for more than two seconds.

leagues are a great way to have a fresh start/economy.

but that said, one major thing that killed leagues for me is the fact that there is a lot of end game content.

my FOMO of missing out the content is higher than FOMO of missing a league.

as for you, you had problems in red tier maps. for me my problem is that i like to use my own non meta build because its what ive been using for years. i struggled and manage to get it to clear shaper/sirus during leagues and i feel a great sense of accomplishment.

ggg went ahead and kept releasing harder content. all beginning with maven. which introduced her invites which are in no way balanced. recently they also introduced uber pinnacle encounters. i have tried them on STANDARD. i could barely scratch any of them. there simply is too many things that i cant normally clear using my substandard build. why would i play a substandard build? a lot of ppl would say git gud scrub or "play weak build expect to clear end game content heh". my counterargument was this game was very different from how it used to be. its not the game i signed up for. this game touted itself as a game that has a lot of build flexibility and yet "tough" game. that was true back then. now with the uber pinnacle bosses. i can say with confidence. GGG DGAF melee strikes.

playing in a new league leaves me salty knowing that i have to temper my expectations that i can achieve everything i have on std in the league.


also with maven, came atlas passives which are really too good that you cant ignore it.

now atlas passives are more balanced out where you CAN unlock a huge portion of the atlas without even touching the invites. but even then not getting a few more points can actually mean losing out the ability to juice your maps more.

so much fomo i simply cant enjoy a new league. it doesnt help that GGG made the game significantly harder.

i m all up for leagues that give more mobs, but based on ggg's recent league mechanics, its more about buffing existing mobs and making them deadlier. really not a fan of dying. if a league mechanic involves buffing monsters up and my current goal is to level up. i m skipping that mechanic hard.

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XRuecian wrote:

I am kinda confused as to how bleed got so dangerous all of a sudden. A few leagues ago, bleed was 'dangerous' but not like instant death deadly. Now it feels like if an enemy uses puncture you might just get bled out within one second. You dont even have time to use a flask sometimes.

The fact that the game basically forces you to find a way to be immune to corrupting blood and bleed both is really bad game design. There should be ways to mitigate this damage without needing to find difficult FULL immunity.

In my experience full immunity is not necessary - flask is enough - if you dont have a particular weakness against bleed.

"

XRuecian wrote:

My character is sitting at nearly 80% phys res and i still find myself getting bled out within one second often. Its made me stop playing this league altogether pretty much.

The character screen phys mitigation stat is useless for this. Armour does not help against bleed. Only hard phys mitigation (Endurance charges, "additional physical mitigation" stat) does. Pantheon and other DoT damage reductions also help. And better recovery and bigger buffer.

"

XRuecian wrote:

I almost quit before that when i ran into a rare mob with the Treant mod and its pack of treant that were still slightly off my screen all decided to drop bombs under my feet. A green bomb in the middle of the green grass with no real notable sound effect, and then boom, i die instantly, to enemies offscreen. It's not like this is a hard mechanic to deal with. But the fact that it is so badly telegraphed graphically and that they can do it from offscreen makes it feel very unfun to interact with. And thats just one of the many AN mods that are similar. It feels like EVERYTHING just spawns directly on top of you now and/or leaves deadly pools on the floor.

In PoE 3.18 you need more defenses incl significant chaos resist and keep moving with sufficient speed. If you stand still with mobs around and dont have a tank build you will get killed in many ways.

"

XRuecian wrote:

Imagine trying to play a channeling spell right now. Try standing still for more than two seconds.

Weak stand-still-to-do-DPS builds do very badly in PoE 3.18.

"

If I have 35k Evasion, 100% Spell supression and 100 ailment avoidance aswell as 50% stun immunity.

Thats paper thin, it would have been paper thin even before nemesis rares and scourge.

That setup basicaly reads I surive til my evasion doesnt work = dead.

"

Imagine trying to play a channeling spell right now. Try standing still for more than two seconds.

I played with stormburst out of boredom on my champion for a while it worked really well. If you have enough damage and cast speed channeling isnt really more static than any other type of dps.