We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

So I've gotten further into the content of the game this league than I ever have before, and it's thanks to the QoL and Currency system changes. One thing that slowed me down was currency exchange, and I was usually bugging my Guildmates for exchanging. Now that I can just shop for stackables, the game is completely different and improved. Thanks to that, I've had the chance to start dabbling in crafting.

I made my very first item from nothing more than a base item this league, and it completely changed my experience in the game. I'm actually starting to learn the crafting system, which in turn increases my options in buying gear, which increases my ability to interface with the game.

ALL because I can now buy Essences without having to message, wait to be ignored, then shop again after failing a craft, waiting to be ignored... or buy massively in bulk and then wait to sell off the excess.

Kingsmarch is super fun as well, and I love the customizability of the Runes. It's making me want to play different builds with just being able to SEE what modifiers I can put on main weapons. The Gold system is also incentivizing me to clear Maps and keep coming back to the content.

I also appreciate the Sliders reference from Isla. The letters are also nice little bits of world building. Loved the "You're alive!" one.

The Hirelings for Mapping is also GREAT. It lets me use my old and outdated maps for something positive. I have to say, everything about the current League is an absolute WIN. I just have 1 thing left to explore. The Recombinator. I will need to study it's effects, but I'm looking forward to slapping things together and seeing what I get.

In other words, I hope all the content of this League ends up becoming permanent, including the shipping. I find it a nice side interest that keeps me coming back into logging in, without being an overly powerful income source. It's balanced!

Please keep Kingsmarch, mostly or completely the way it is now. Maybe add more buildings, shops, and services for League content in the future? Either permanent or temporary, it's a great canvas for exploring systems without having them all waiting for you in Lioneye's Watch.

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It lets me use my old and outdated maps for something positive.

You can 3-for-1 maps at the vendor for a map that's (naturally) 1 tier higher. Furthermore, some legitimate farming strategies involve white maps, particularly tier 5. You can always filter out the tiers you don't care about. There's actually no friction here that was only addressed by Kingsmarch. Plus, sending your Kingsmarch mappers into low-tier maps yields a poor return on your gold investment. You are getting what we call "bubblegum currency," which is the common stuff that everyone has hundreds or thousands of, which isn't meaningful in a vacuum but even less so this league; you're also getting some rare items whose item level is too low to be useful on its own and whose mods are not well-rolled like gear from shipping rewards or even gambling. The best return on gold is from shipping, but you'd even be better off gambling it away to Faustus than for the chance to trade your white and yellow maps for what amounts to trash, not just because of the gold cost, but because there are other uses for those maps too.

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The fact that you have to go OUT OF THE GAME to try to buy items from trade is mind blowing.

Fun fact: there wasn't even a trade site for a long time, and it only came into existence by accident. They added a feature to the forums where you could display an in-game item, thinking only that players would use it to show off their cool stuff, but missing that players would scrape this data and compile a database of items available for trade. This provided a distinct advantage to English-speaking players, so to level the playing field, they were forced to create and maintain the trade site. They never wanted to reduce friction in trading, even to the point of the trade site, until this league. This is because trading is incredibly, incredibly powerful, to the point of trivializing a massive percentage of what would otherwise be your journey to power. This was seen as unhealthy for the game.

It just goes to show that a live service game never stays the same, and that the way things are is not necessarily reflective of the way things were meant to be. I hope you can keep that in mind when evaluating the rest of the game too, because there are certainly other features that have not aged well, but every league they attempt to address at least one of these systems, and feedback about what's fun and unfun is helpful up until the point where one is asking for things to be easier that don't need to be.

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CostanzaK wrote:

<OP's post>.

So nice to hear someone appreciating this league instead of complaining about loot scarcity and T17s. Glad you are enjoying it!

I just got into crafting last league, but it was mostly using the graveyard for multiple fracture bases. So now I'm having to relearn how to workaround 1 or no fractures. It is fun and super rewarding.

Link your item that you crafted!

For the recombinator, there is a really good deep dive into the updated mechanics of it. It is linked on the wiki. If you are reading about it anywhere else, make sure what you are looking at is for 3.25 recombination, things have changed since the old ones.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator


Definitely recommend exploring them. You can make finished items with them, but its more trouble than its worth in my experience. Where they really shine is crafting bases.
You can use them to shuffle a mod around to a desired base or good starting mods on base, kind of like a pseudo soft fracture (obviously they arent locked in like a fracture unless you use a metamod to do so). Also great for increasing item level of an item, if needed for crafting.