top 5 worst leagues in poe history

this is league mechanic ONLY, not "state of the game" such as expedition massive skill nerf, lake of kalandra loss of players etc., the actual league mechanic ONLY


i'll start:

1. torment
2. crucible
3. abyss
4. breach
5. prophecy

what's your top 5 worst league mechanics?

hoho ill bite.

1. harvest - Everyone got spoiled after that.

2. torment

3. betrayal

4. breach

5. abyss

My least favorite:

Synthesis

Beastiary

Harvest (mirror drop couldn't keep me playing)

Kalandra

Crucible

Ultimatum

kalandra
crucible
prophecy
abyss
bestiary

Let's check... Legion, Delirium, Synthesis, Bestiary, Crucible.

Legion, Delirium, and Synthesis because they caused me technical problems that made the game unplayable. Bestiary because of nets, and Crucible because of recency bias.

I started only in Incursion and missed a few, but here are mine:

1. Harvest
2. Sanctum
3. Crucible
4. Scourge
5. Sentinel

It's an interesting question because unless you are pretty addicted to the league concept and showing off your numbers (ilu J but u no its tru), you probably won't play much of the leagues you don't like and just stick to standard or play something else.

So two top five worsts then: 5 I played and didnt love, 5 I skipped because they just didn't appeal to me. Keeping in mind I quit after 2020 but started in CB so I still have quite a few leagues to pick from.

Top 5 worst leagues played, least bad to ugh why

Perandus (nice idea, terrible lag-heavy spawn mexhanic)
Tempest (just kinda boring)
Beyond (HC imbalance)
Invasion (as above)
Metamorph (whichever that one with the organ collecting was, bullet sponge boredom)

Top 5 worst leagues I noped out of for various reasons:

Incursion (timed dps check yawn)
Synthesis (too convoluted a setup)
Bestiary (terrible premise and appropriately terrible mechanic)
Breach (timed dps check yawn)
Heist (had already quit but also jesus just make a different game if you want to do an Ocean's Eleven homage)

So assume any league I didn't mention that came out prior to 2020 I actually liked to some degree. None of those afterwards interested me in the slightest. Chasing the rogue-lite trend when shit like Hades already exists was...ill-advised, for example.

Kalandra - Huge missed opportunity on both loot and lore. Very poorly balanced. Beyond rework was a total dud. Essences were bugged. Wild loot changes (at least they salvaged that in current year and turned it into a positive). Terrain was terrible for some movement skills in the lake. And I'm sorry but you can't ignore what they did to the atlas mechanics in this league because the Lake tile sets leveraged them as reward rooms and fight types. I did a beyond distance 7 the first weekend, painstakingly kited the encounter for over 15 minutes and it dropped 2 white items and 1 blue item. Out of hundreds of beyond mobs.

Bestiary - If you were there you know - the mechanic was poorly executed from a gameplay perspective. Obviously it somewhat stood the test of time as a system, but the carrying nets around and timing the throw was not conducive to the ARPG game they built.

Ascendancy - yeah yeah an expansion not a league. The lab was insufferable on launch.

Prophecy - I like prophecy but it wasn't terribly engaging and PoE had a lot of tech issues for my machine that league. Still got monkey pet of course. To be objective this league belongs in at least the bottom 10.

Sanctum - its an unpopular opinion but this league was overly punishing to too many builds and the relics weren't permanent beyond the league which is always a buzzkill for me. Couldn't be arsed to reroll away from my melee starter for a voided league mechanic. As said above, Hades did it so well (and I happened to have just 100% the Hades achievements when Sanctum launched) that this really didn't sit with me at all. If they made this a fixture in the game and supported it on the atlas tree I wouldn't spec into it.

Maybe that's a good way to evaluate a league. If it had support on the atlas tree how likely would you be to spec into it?

Anyways honorable mention to Blight for being a bad league. Very bad bug and lag issues with the blights themselves that lasted too long and the blighted map drops were way too rare.

Only been playing since Metamorph, so keep that in mind. My worst 5:

1. Ritual: Its like Ultimatum which had better rewards and more fun due to the risk vs. reward thing. Very annoying in closed up spaces where some mobs hide in some corner and u are stuck looking for them. Decent new gear options but other than that really uninspired.

2. Sanctum: Worst ever for me as this goes against the entire concept of the game. "dont get hit" is something for boss mechanics, not every single mini rare. Also, disregarding defenses has never been as prominent here due to the resolve-mechanic. So glad it didnt go core.

3. Metamorph: Was fine back then since it was my first league, in retrospect pretty boring mechanic though: the false pretense of your choice when u actually just slot on currency, scarabs and unique Organs is just plain boring.

4. Scourge: One of the most boring crafting leagues. Really uninspired, just pure powercreep with additional stats and in regards to the corrupted currency I think it is a very slippery slope to say "corrupted items is the final endpoint" and then to introduce options to keep manipulating items. I like that this took over the old beyond though, was a solid update and its a viable farming strat for edpecially early game in new leagues.

5. Crucible
I like the notables that change the functionality of certain spells for a well-needed meta shakeup. But thats mostly T5. T1 - T4 is again boring powercreep, the merging of the trees is less intuitive as for example Sentinel was and it adaps again the "more power through more stats" principle, no matter if those are implicits or in a tree. Also, its again circular spawning like 5 other mechanics and the mobs are on 100% really dangerous, even for mirror builds - overtuned if you ask me.

That being said, very hard to not list lake of kalandra as this league felt like a lot of missed potential.