Proposal: Allow Players to Spend Gold to Resurrect in Maps

Path of Exile 2’s endgame suffers from two problems:

"

1. Many players view the one-death penalty in maps to be too punishing - especially with the sheer amount of lethal damage, desyncs/lag spikes in high mob density, and general lack of player defenses present in endgame maps. At the same time, a vocal portion of the playerbase enjoys the one-death penalty, as it encourages making educated decisions about the maps you run, the builds you make, and the risks you take to farm more currency. Pleasing both camps seems to be at odds with one another.

2. The endgame currently lacks a gold sink. Respeccing talent points costs a trivial amount of gold; gambling in town/at hideout produces unfruitful results; and buying waystones from Doryani to upgrade into higher-tier maps stops being useful after T5 or so. Once players spend a few dozen hours in the Atlas, they will have accumulated so much gold (in the millions) with nothing to spend it on. Gold becomes a useless resource, and +gold% modifiers on waystones become dead mods.

My solution to both of these problems: Upon dying in a map, allow players to spend a gold fee to resurrect in the map. Resurrecting this way refunds the player their lost experience and places them back at the start of the map. In return, resurrecting reduces the item quantity and item rarity in the map, while also drastically increasing the gold cost of resurrecting upon subsequent deaths. After a certain point (let’s say 3 deaths), players are no longer able to resurrect and must abandon the map. They may abandon the map prior to this point as well, with no chance of re-entering once they do so.

This solution is intended to appease both of the player factions described above in Point 1 while also staying true to Path of Exile’s vision: where actions have consequences, and smart use of game systems allows players to take increasingly dangerous risks to reap higher and higher rewards. Skilled players can still clear many maps in a row without dying. New players and players with undergeared characters can attempt an extra shot or two at completing the map, with a penalty to their loot – ensuring that they will obtain the basic items they sought in the map (e.g., waystones from a boss) without outright rewarding them for ‘throwing bodies at the problem.’ Essentially, this solution is a softer version of the ‘walk of shame’ players must perform after dying in a map, where they must attempt it again without any Tower mods.

Meanwhile, gold under this system becomes a valuable resource – but not a mandatory one. All gold does in this system is allow new players to learn from their mistakes (or give players running maniacally difficult maps another attempt at getting the most out of the currency they spent juicing the map). Steep gold costs would prevent players from brute forcing their way through the Atlas. As players improve, they may see less and less of a need to spend gold to progress through their Atlas. This sequence of events would act as an unspoken way for players to measure their progress as a player. A new player might tell themselves, “Hey, I haven’t needed to buy a rez in a while. I must be getting better, and my gear must be improving.” It would also prevent gold farming from third party services, because gold under this system would not translate to player power. Gold would be a safety net, nothing more.

I haven’t yet figured out how this system would work in multiplayer games.

Note that implementing this system would likely require a shift of item quantity/rarity stats from gear to maps themselves. This actually solves a third problem in Early Access, where many players dread having to ‘waste’ valuable gear slots on magic find stats that could otherwise have been used on survivability or utility mods.

Thanks for reading.

I agree. One extra tweak solution: gold must be pick up by players (no trade) and this must be expensive according to lvl of player.

Interesting take. I don't know how many gold "blasters" make, I have 7m ATM and I don't see any need for it, and respec is quite cheap (I am fine throwing away 0.2-0.5k from time to time). So it may be difficult to balance it, but I'd probably use it from time to time, e.g. if it costed 1m to res and most importantly - keep the drops - I think that sometimes, but not always, I'd use this possibility.

I'd be curious to see what the stats are on gold earned per hour, weighed against time invested. And yeah, the intent here is for gold resurrections to

1. Be a crutch for new players that doesn't hold their hand or reward their mistakes, which they will rely on less and less as they improve
2. Act as a way for experienced players to take high risks, with a high-cost safety net if they wish to keep trying their luck

"

DarkDredd#2184 wrote:

I agree. One extra tweak solution: gold must be pick up by players (no trade) and this must be expensive according to lvl of player.

Good point. There are already 'services' that allow players to obtain gold through 'other means,' so adding this restriction is crucial.

i dont know how to feel about this .

on one had i fully support that we need more tries at a map .

but reviving for gold? how much gold? you know it would turn into i cant revive once , but the top blasters revive all the time . buff gold , nerf gold , remove gold . etc.

i think just 6 portals back would be the best solution , no side alley solutions.

You get one portal per map


Devs made it quite clear this is how the game will be

Maybe do it in a form of Omens or smth that you can buy with gold while playing endgame content. Gold is currently useless in endgame - that's a fact.

Jonathan described how he would like to let the player retry an Atlas node if they die, by letting them insert another waystone. However, he was not sure how to make this work without players abusing the system to reset mobs and encounters, and farm specific aspects of the waystone in an unethical way.

Here are a few that I have:

1) When a player enters an Atlas node, a "deactivated" version of the waystone they just used is placed into the players inventory.

This waystone can be reactivated to use on other Atlas nodes by using a special new type of item that can be found in certain types of content, such as expeditions and rituals. This means that the player can have a return on investment in an organic way and not feel so bad when they fail.

2) When a player fails an Atlas node, the node does not reset and the player can make a decision on whether they want to spend another waystone to re-enter and finish the node.

The vendor that sells waystones to the player now sells a special type of waystone that just reactivates the map node if it has a fail state. The thing to consider here to prevent abuse is the state of the map content completion upon death.

In my view, mobs/packs would not respawn, boss encounters would reset if they are not dead, and content such as expeditions would already be in the state they are in just before the player failed. The exception to this would be rituals which will be in a failed state, but the player can still do other rituals if they are in the area.

Loot that has dropped will remain on the map until the player enters another node entirely. This makes it functionally the same as if the player just left the map to go to the hideout and came back.
This could effectively allow the player to pick up loot they may have missed by dying, by paying a small fee to the waystone vendor.

3) Portals/retries are tied to the tier of the waystone.

You could ease the player into early mapping by reducing the punishing aspect of there being only one attempt at the start, and as the player progresses through the waystone tiers they get less and less portals/retries.

For example, a tier 1 waystone might have 6 portals and lower rolls on prefixes/suffixes, but tier 12 and above waystones might only have 1 portal/retry but have access to rolling on higher versions of those prefixes/suffixes.

The way this might work is that a tier 1 to tier 11 waystone might only get a maximum of say 200% more gold one of its rolls, and in tier 12 and above that can go up to 300%-400% with a minimum roll of lets say 150%.

You could even divide this even further and have a lower tier (1-6, 6 portals), a mid tier (7-11, 3 portals), and a high tier (12-16, 1 portal).

More risk, more reward.

Trial of Sekhemas

This is going to go a bit off-topic, but it is related none-the-less.
I think that one attempt at the final boss on the 4th floor in Trial of the Sekhemas is too punishing for new players trying to get their ascendancy, due to the fact that the player will inevitably die the first time if they are not running an overpowered build or paying for a carry.

Yes, you could watch a Youtube video guide of the fight before you do it (which I don't like in video game culture in general) but you still do not have the experience of actually being in the fight.
My own solution to this would be to have the boss have as many attempts as the player needs until they get their ascendancy point, then afterwards in future runs they get a limited amount of retries.

Bumping this, because it's been a while.

I want to start with an apology, the way I ended our last conversation was callous and I was caught up in the malice I guess that I've perceived has plagued this forum recently.

I do think inherently this is a dangerous idea that would have heavy impact on the economy, after all this would lead to more items and currency being available on the markets, but perhaps it is worth it to smooth out player experience for the time being.

How would you feel about an adjustment to that resurrects eliminate all remaining monsters, bosses and league mechanics but leave the remaining loot on the floor for you to pick up?