Leveling D4 without campaign it struck me POE is missing an ENDGAME activity that feels free form

This is not a request to skip POE's campaign. I'm playing D4 and skipping the campaign. Which makes D4 surprisingly somewhat tolerable, and sandbox-adjacent. I am actually enjoying the free form ARPG gameplay loop. Now D4 is bad, make no mistake, no one should buy it its a $15-20 dollar game at best. But the core loop of uninterrupted gamplay is something I'm REALLY MISSING FROM POE. Delve would be this thing (in fact its my all time favorite endgame thing to do in POE and I often quit playing POE when I run out of a large surplus of sulphite and have to go back to mapping) but its hopelessly linked with a mapping only resource.

Spamming Act areas to farm league mechanics (which I often do when its possible and these always end up being my longest lasting leagues) is also similar.

In D2 you just played the game with tiny bits of downtime while resetting. Like delve or act area spamming I REALLY MISS THIS especially at endgame. Mapping Micro is beyond exhausting these days. especially when you bring in currency and juicing.

To be clear I do not mind POE's campaign at all because its heavy on gameplay and light on questing and basically zero dialog tree garbage. This feedback is not about that.

To put this in perspective; if GGG turned Crucble league on right now (or Betrayal or many others) or just deleted Sulphite I would be spamming Reliquary, or Delving right now instead of playing D4. I'm not exaggerating or being remotely hyperbolic. I'm not playing POE because I'm dead tired of mapping endgame and there's no opportunity to play POE endgame without them unless its a league mechanic that works in Act 10 areas.

Out of curiosity, if you rolled up a quad tab of maps before chain running them (I see racers do this), would that ease your pain?

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TemjinGold wrote:

Out of curiosity, if you rolled up a quad tab of maps before chain running them (I see racers do this), would that ease your pain?

Perfectly reasonable question; no it just puts a "oh god now I have to do a bigger map rolling session" in front of playing. Its not unlike the feeling needing to pay bills. In fact thats a perfect description, only it needs to be done constantly multiple times a night.

The same way you dread logging into a game because you know the first thing you have to do is a weekly or daily in an MMO, or inventory sorting or in POE's case "dump tab sorting" is a good parallel.

Best case for me seems to be alc and go'ing 8-ish maps at a time (transmute and go in ruthless mode) and only playing builds that can do all map mods. But both of these things have strong downsides and make the game narrower.

no matter how I map I hate the interruption of flow and the parsing of text rolls on the maps, handling currency and manipulating inventory, remembering/forgetting to put mods on (crafts, remembering to enable or disable maven/eater/exarch). I've tried every possible permutation. I always feel like I'm forgetting something and quite often I did.

In any case I am aware that many love mapping I just have spent the last few years eagerly awaiting an alternative. They teased me pretty hard with Heist by calling it "parallel endgame activity" once upon a time but it never actually was unless you like buying content which might actually be worse than rolling maps.

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alhazred70 wrote:

iption, only it needs to be done constantly multiple times a night.

The same way you dread logging into a game because you know the first thing you have to do is a weekly or daily in an MMO.

If you don't like something like that you're in the wrong game or genre. Cause weekly or daily quests are what most people enjoy the most since it adds some content to-do across the week or day whether it be pve, pvp, raids, dungeons or other side stuff lol.

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alhazred70 wrote:

The same way you dread logging into a game because you know the first thing you have to do is a weekly or daily in an MMO, or inventory sorting or in POE's case "dump tab sorting" is a good parallel.

Weird take right there...I can't name a single friend EVER who plays an MMO or a game with "dailies" that dreads doing the dailies. It's literally WHY they play those games.

Same reason why I play PoE for the randomized loot. If I "dreaded" the random nature of drops, I wouldn't be playing a game in which one of the core systems is random drops. If I "dreaded" having to build a brand new character every few days or weeks, I would have moved on from aRPGs a LONG LONG time ago. There are folks in these forums that complain about these very core aspects of the game and want them changed (forgiveness systems, etc.), and I just question WHY they are playing a game like this one?

ex: "I love playing chess, but I really hate the way the knight moves. Why can't we make the knight just move in a straight line?"

D2 is a terrible comparison: there was zero endgame. it is incompatible in the discussion
D4 is also a pretty terrible comparison because...its a terrible game as per your own thoughts.

If things are pared down TOO much...auto maps, "long" uninterrupted sessions, etc. I think you would get bored of the game a LOT faster. There is something to be said for "forced" breaks in content and longevity of interest. Even though I LOVE LOVE LOVE it, I don't find grinding maps endlessly to be fun 100% of the time. I get tired of it, I get bored, I take a break. If I were doing the same amount of mapping in a tenth of the time, I would also likely stop playing 10x earlier.

I legit can't understand the mentality of not wanting to roll maps or customize endgame content. That is precisely what makes PoE so fantastic...the ability to customize and craft each and every endgame encounter you CHOOSE to run. If you don't want to do all that, you don't have to and can chain maps all day and night with a fraction of a second per map setup.

That being said, I DO think improvements can be made and I've commented on other threads with my thoughts on endgame loop improvements: but we need to be VERY careful when it comes to automation of parts of the process because that can SERIOUSLY kill the endgame enjoyment more than I think people care to think about. Breaks are GOOD long-term, artificial or otherwise. Too many breaks with no shorter option...that's a problem. Luckily we HAVE shorter options.

Yeah, I kind of wish the endgame was more ignorant.
I don't like planning all my build stuff and getting to mapping, doing the map atlas, and then having to sit in my base rolling maps and reading which obnoxious unplayable mods are on the map, and re-rolling so i get mods that arent absolute poopoo (aka easy as F)

if you enjoy mapping and rolling mods and getting more profit from that, sure have at it.

me personally i would like to see a random rotation of map zones with less investment and if you need to nerf the rewards for that then sure.

The current system makes me feel fatigued interacting with it, and i can see why the delve players feel more comfortable there. Though i cant stand being in dark areas 99% of the time so thats a no-go for me.

I don't mind the campaign as much these days because you just have to go through the zone. I don't want to spend time reading map mods ontop of all this other stuff, yeah i could just roll white maps but then you dont get the atlas bonus so you're forced to roll them still.

Idk its a personal issue, but there's too much going on in my life for me to be reading map mods and rolling maps when I just want to mindlessly play a game.

I love hopping into a fighting game and picking my character and fighting the other guy, I don't have to read about which special moves are gonna 1 shot my character every round.

And again, If you like the investment and reading the maps and doing all that I'm not saying you're wrong or bad for enjoying it.

Yeah but I can take a break whenever I want, not every time ive reached a wall in my tabs, maps, or otherwise. I have control over my life and my actions.

I play a lot of monster hunter, I don't think i would play as much if i had to roll quests all the time and go through my inventory looking for quests that dont have mods that kill my character after every quest or 10 quests or whatever.

In fact I really wish monster hunter had an endless questing thing too, that had its own reward structure.

I wouldn't suggest GGG remove mapping or change mapping, its just not engaging for certain players, especially considering how the campaign is played, IE without any of that nonsense.

The atlas tree is great because you set it up incrementally and it saves its changes upto that point, you dont have to go back to your atlas and re-roll mods that appear on it that kill your character or make mapping tedious.

This game has enough content to support all kinds of playstyles, and if a meta evolves from it that becomes "too profitable" or whatever, im certain GGG will correctly fix anomalies that pop up.

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Pashid wrote:

If you don't like something like that you're in the wrong game or genre.

I dunno if you're just trying to antagonize a reaction with this line or you've just never played any other ARPG's.

I mean in my post I describe how multiple ARPG's work (and don't contain micromanagement of every zone like POE does) and how POE sometimes works like them under specific circumstances.

But I'm guessing you're just out for a reaction and you've surely played other games in the ARPG genre so you know those words aren't constructive or accurate.

good point! Much needed in ruthless mode!

When Zana was around PoE had much more exploration and adventure feel to it.

Funny to think such a simple thing as an NPC spawning another map in your current map would have this impact but it did for me. Go into a map, do a core mechanic, find Zana, go into another map, do an abyss that leads into an abyss dungeon then pop out, do the league mechanic kill the boss pop out of the map. Do the league mechanic in the original map, kill the boss.

Both D4 and PoE completely lack this sense of dynamic adventure.