PoE - Bloated Beyond Recognition

I'm not sure where to begin or where this will end up but here'goes...

I've played on and off since beta, ranging from 100% no lifing to casual weekends. It's probably the game I have the most # of hours in, and I'm almost 40. I say all that to say, I love PoE and am super hyped for PoE2.

As of late, however, I find I don't really recognize the game or how I'm supposed to play it. I had a sort of funny realization when I completed a steam achievement recently. I did the pre-exarch/eater of worlds bosses and saw that only 3% of players had achieved those. That's kinda sad. Uber bosses are what... 0.5% of players? Imagine spending tens or hundreds of thousands... (or maybe even millions?) on content that 0.5% of your playerbase will see.


Here's the problem areas I see with potential fixes:

Problem: Too many affixes/mods on gear (influences, league-specific, etc.)

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I don't understand the logic for ultra-rare/difficult to attain itemization scheme in a game with a 3-month refresh cadence. Most people play a few weeks, maybe a month. So it should be reasonable to attain pinnacle-worthy strength within that time period without being a full time streamer.

Solution:




Problem: Dropped gear is useless. Why even generate it?

Solution:



Problem: There's too many things to do, yea, I said it. What good is 10/100 of each shard type for 5 different leagues?

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I realize you can "unspec" or simply "skip" the mechanics, but nah...

Solution:



Problem: Simple "meat and potatoes" builds no longer work

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If you don't have 100 mil dps from some infinite scaling factor, broken interaction, or mirrored gear, even rare mobs can be unkillable in some situations. All of these new interactions added over the years should be supplementary with a tradeoff not mandatory and combinatory.

Solution:



I'll stop there. It's enough to chew on for a bit.

if GGG made an atlas node that disabled all masters for some other benefit, i d take it

if GGG made an atlas node disabling essence/beyond/exiles/tormented souls etc for some other benefit, id take it too.

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exsea wrote:

if GGG made an atlas node that disabled all masters for some other benefit, i d take it

if GGG made an atlas node disabling essence/beyond/exiles/tormented souls etc for some other benefit, id take it too.

+1

It's kinda weird that some leagues can be disabled, but not the others.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

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exsea wrote:

if GGG made an atlas node that disabled all masters for some other benefit, i d take it

if GGG made an atlas node disabling essence/beyond/exiles/tormented souls etc for some other benefit, id take it too.

+1

It's kinda weird that some leagues can be disabled, but not the others.

yeah... and i m huge advocate for player choice.

i m quite happy how GGG gave us a lot of choice, would be happier if we were given more choice with the atlas.

on the flipside, GGG robbed player choice with AN.

i wholeheartedly resent GGG for this.

i can understand why AN was made but we were robbed of the choice to opt out.

unlike nemesis mods, AN mods permeates all content.

I 100% agree with everything that the OP said, the game has reached peak levels of feature creep and needs to be a bit more simple.

Also every league doesnt need anything super complicated and new, if a new league came with just support or rework for old skills i would play it if the reworked/supported skills fited my playstyle.

Quality is better than quantity!

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Deeganz wrote:

If you're out of ideas, hire someone new.

Certainly no shortage of ideas here on the forum :P

Been asking for a lot of what they've added in regards to diversifying and enabling endgame outside of the core mechanic, when i see "bloat" in a title its scary though the first thing i expect to see is people requesting content be made into a farm-simulator.

One of the reasons they might have focused a little bit on super-endgame content(at least i hope this is why because its why i posted about it so much) was to separate the super-high-end players from the normal content rotation as they were making ALL of it worthless and new players who did reach endgame were selling pennies to try and get dollars while the super-late game people were just printing 1000 dollar bills... That effect is still at play but i think what they did with ubers alleviated the situation a bit and also opened an avenue of trade for players who cant run uber-content to supply and profit off farming the invitations and other boss related fragments.

When i requested they add these fights it included (more tiers) between story-mode and ultra-supersayian-uber-mode to let people get better and edge out more and more profits while also removing themselves from separate drop pools in each tier of the endgame fight.. Each tier shares some drops with the others but has exclusive or semi-exclusive drop pools.