Ruthless is a masquerade

Ruthless is the new hardcore mode, we all get it.

The fact about it is, that it is a masquerade, an attempt to distract the players, and especially new players who joined just now, or may join in the future, from the matter at hand.

You [GGG] nerfed item drop rates and quality with your recent big update coming with Kalandra League, and have gotten a lot of critique about it which you brushed away with your usual ignorance of the matter, complete with the usual attempts to smoothtalk it as "it will make sense guys, it will make sense!".

Now you know WHY and HOW it makes sense; we now have a gameplay option that does everything your nerf does, but only stronger. No more buyable gems, no more amulets and nerfed rewards, even drops are completely nerfed into oblivion with Ruthless option enabled.

There is a correlation with this decision and the current state of the game. You have received a lot of complaints and some fanboys praising you for the decisions making, but Ruthless is quite obvious an attempt to smooth this all over by saying "Yo look, guys! You are lucky to get ANY drops at all, I mean look at these poor guys in ruthless, they aren't getting anything at all!!".

It's like your Boss cutting your wages by 50% and when you complain he hires a homeless dude to clean the workshop who only gets paid in whatever he can find in the refuse, and then your Boss says "Well, look at that guy! He's only getting paid what he finds in the rubble, you are lucky you get some money, I mean... look at how hard HE has it!!!".

With this logic you may as well nerf the game so you have no dual slots anymore but only one hand slot and one body armor piece and make a gameplay option or league that you have to play bare handed. "Look guys, you complain about having less weapon and armor slots, but look at THESE poor guys, they have to fight BAREHANDED!".

It's just another piece in the masquerade, the charade, that the players are subject to. And the sad part of the story is, all the new people don't and won't even realize what all this game has lost.

Why are the Devs even working on the game, just to make us suffer? Every day I think about how things were, my Nemesis builds, Exalted drops, the Tempest league too. The item drops and speedruns we lost thanks to nerfs, and the legacy item rolls we lost. They won't stop hurting, but it's like they are all still there. I think some of you feel it too. Let's hope GGG gives us back our past.

Of course, its like the birds of paradise from the galapagos isles, all of the vampires wear a beaked mask.

There are different customers to this game, one category called "traders" just sit around in town and earn money, they are like the bloodleeches because they can afford to suck at the game, their definition of game changed to not hit on monsters to get to the booty.

The other category are the "supporters", they work their ass off and are happy with being abused, they are following the migratory routes of the traders because its easier to live in symbiosys with them, they collect round objects like 3faced stones which are used by the traderbirds for nesting.

Then you have a select few "blooddonors" that actually just want to enjoy the fruits of the archipelago and live unbothered in the wilderness.
A few of them are interested in evolving to become the top of the leaderbords, attempting to stay away from alot of the easy prey by claiming "to have achieved something "hard"".
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The fact that this populationcontrol into several splinterleagues always leads to a reduction of human bloodbags for trademarket, is a indication for the verbal outcries of the traderfaction, doing traderbusiness always gets harder with lesser resources.
What this step allows the devs to do is "make hardmode more harder" and "babymode more babyier", resulting in trade getting harder in babymode because everyone gets their fiftyseventh sixlinks by act 2.
Therefor the commercial migratorybirds would want to follow the flock into hardmode, the worst part would be the head of development announcing that there are more birds on the harder islands than on the usual nestinggrounds.

To preserve this naturereserve it is of utmost importance to not release any playerstatistics.

Needless to say why "refilling flask" and "healing bosses by tping out" isn´t part of the core like its in every other arpg.

"

Why are the Devs even working on the game, just to make us suffer? Every day I think about how things were, my Nemesis builds, Exalted drops, the Tempest league too. The item drops and speedruns we lost thanks to nerfs, and the legacy item rolls we lost. They won't stop hurting, but it's like they are all still there.

Damn, I play the game a lot but I've never been even close to this emotionally invested in virtual pixels

Well, it is but not really for the reasons claimed.

Itemization in the game has been increasingly difficult for years now. Pretty much since Shape/Elder influence. The introduction is BiS Abyssal Belts, Curse on Hit Delve Rings, All the Conq Affixes, Cluster Jewels when they were twice as potent.

As time went on map enemies, esp League enemies were balanced around this pool.

The "masquerade" is attempting to claim some nostalgia for Ruthless. Fact is, itemization was easy in beta, not harder. They got the part of players being slower right but that's about it. They skipped over enemies also being slower, far fewer in number and the power creep compensating.

Under current conditions I can already see it playing out. Most will grab spell builds cuz they don't rely on gear as much. Acts will feel hard but doable though some may still resort to the reset and spam method of old then when they get to maps and enemy density is considerably higher they'll die.

The whole mode is just moving the "GearCheck" of the game. There's no Difficulty.
Which says quite a bit about difficulty in current PoE.

the more i think about it, the more plausible it is that recent summoners nerfs were directly tied to Ruthless

summoners (more than totems/brands/traps) are perfect choice for this mode, even more so if you can get to maps with no gear. maybe summoners massacre (after 5 years of unquestionable rein in no-budget category) actually has all to do with Ruthless after all

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sidtherat wrote:

the more i think about it, the more plausible it is that recent summoners nerfs were directly tied to Ruthless

summoners (more than totems/brands/traps) are perfect choice for this mode, even more so if you can get to maps with no gear. maybe summoners massacre (after 5 years of unquestionable rein in no-budget category) actually has all to do with Ruthless after all

I was considering quoting one of your earlier posts in a different thread where you talk about builds that aren't gear dependent in Ruthless to repeat a point I made even earlier than that where I stated that Ruthless is just going to highlight to GGG what builds go against the spirit of the game mode, their vision, by being very powered by passive tree and gem level and they will nerf accordingly -- I cited minion builds as my example of it already happening. They've nerfed DoTs (bleed in particular) here and there as well in tiny ways which means they'll probably do a much bigger nerf to them at some point once they see that they are also lighter on gear dependency.

Summoners were nerfed because they violated the tenants of GGG, "though shalt not have power within thy budget", this has been a consistent theme with skills and balance changes over the years the only difference is summons have so many types and avenues that everytime they address it another archetype pops up.

Honestly no different this time either, Zombies and Skellies got dunked but SRS, AW and Golems popped back up again.

Realistically it wasn't that much of a nerf overall, only poor zombies really got it hard.