Trash maps for big rewards, what's your opinion ?

Hello/Good evening everyone,

As I don't usually browse the forum (and didn't see this topic on its first page), I'm unsure if this has already been discussed. Just in case, here goes.

I find it particularly frustrating to have to navigate through several trash/empty maps solely to reach a tower that will, on SOME maps, finally provide something worthwhile.

I’m fully aware that PoE 2 is different from its predecessor, but having so much downtime between each 'interesting' part of the game is very frustrating for me.
As a result, I prefer farming Trials of Chaos. It's the only satisfying way I've found to chain content without having to run 1/2/3 empty maps just to reach a tower.

I feel like the current system for juicing maps is too slow and frustrating. What do you think?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any specific suggestions for improvement, but maybe you do?

Thanks for reading, and have fun!

definitely agree, especially trying to set up breach - clearing bad layouts in addition to pathing to towers is a headache. good way to get me to log off when i notice 3 vaal maps sitting in range of the tower i wanted to drop my breach tablet on!

distilling emotions on travel waystones has felt better, and working on getting my ritual tree set up to start mapping in a less layout-dependent manner feels promising. not excited to be hot-swapping my atlas tree depending on if i'm farming quant breaches or pack size rituals though!

regardless, i really enjoy that both Trials stand out as a way of "guaranteed" progression opposed to mapping. no searching for rare spawns or dealing with pathing. just hop in, get your fragments/jewels/cores, kill some rares and uniques and rinse and repeat.

I absolutely must try to add disstiled emotions when I'm trying to reach a tower, it's a good addition and I wasn't even thinking about it. Thanks for the idea.

For breach it's a real headache: reaching the towers by looking for the worst layouts and then trying to hit the right ones with the tablets...

I don't see how juicing can be improved and that makes me a bit sad because I know it's going to hold me back in the medium/long term :(

Thanks for the reply

There are many trash maps and they need to seriously redesign existing maps and add new maps.

They need to work on map balance as far as size number of monsters ease or difficulty.

Some maps are just too small for the characters in The monsters.

Augury, vaal factory, etc.

And you do get choices about which map to run usually. There's usually links in different directions so you have a choice.

Some maps feel like a giant slog. They are sprawling.

For instance in the original incursions in Poe, your character had decent mobility.

I just can't stand anything vaal related in poe2.

Then you have maps like blooming field which should be good but you get stuck on one rock and die and it's also stupid.

I want to play maps with big open areas and nice sceneries. Like beach jungle valley etc.

I would like an option just to skip the map. Just eat my tier 1 map and auto complete it.

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I would like an option just to skip the map. Just eat my tier 1 map and auto complete it.

Sounds great. A simple skip. Such a good idea

Edit : To avoid abuse (such as rush citadels), we could allow a skip every “x” maps completed, for example (other conditions could be set up).

I to dislike running the unjuiced maps along the way to tower clusters and also maps that arent big open fields. But I'm hoping they can create some fun league mechanics that make layouts like mire/forge/vaal foundry more preferable. Right now a big open rectangle is far above every other map type because that makes breaches better.

The changes in 1.1 helped a lot, imo. Getting a map with +magic packs, +magic pack size, +more packs, adding delirium and running it in a hideout node is my new favourite thing to do.

I'm not fond of the idea of just skipping them. They should have some impact on players navigating the atlas. But it would be great to have more options for 'completing' the map.

Maybe an outcome of corrupting a waystone is it becomes a 'mini-waystone' and it creates much smaller maps.

Or pull a mechanic from PoE1 kalgur league and be able to hire mappers that slowly clear a node in exchange for some gold.

And maybe water/rivers have 'express' nodes that chain farther than normal to help us bypass unfavourable areas. Like we're travelling by boat rather than land.