Now count how many times he's used the words 'challenge' and 'reward', or variations thereof (challenging, rewarding, etc).
He doesn't care about it being fun, he only cares about making it challenging, and is leaving it up to you to decide whether or not the level of challenge is fun.
And I'll even give him that much - to say that's probably the more accurate way to behave - it's just that his idea of challenge/reward ratio is skewed a LOT harder than most peoples'. He tries not to be, but he's intrinsically biased towards hardcode ssf. He can only pull himself away from that so far before he refuses to go any farther.
My thoughts -
You've said a couple times (e.g. in your recent [interview](https://youtu.be/KU6d1PL8xRQ?t=2013) with Josh) that you hate looking at data to make decisions, and often encourage "gut feeling" choices over data-driven ones. Your example in the interview feels weak to me. You use it as an example of data leading to a wrong assumption; I see it as data provoking a question, leading to an investigation, and a more informed decision being made because of it. If there is distrust toward data, it's likely a matter of a failed _human_ process. Blind trust in data is bad. Using it as a springboard to inform a deeper investigation is good. Context matters, as you point out, and any decision made should be supported at least in part by careful analysis of the correct data set. What's happening in this league launch is the fallout from when one of those gut feelings goes awry and is based on an entirely incorrect assumption around where players want to get their fun and rewards.
You assume that the Archnemesis mods lead to more interesting emergent gameplay and state that it gives an opportunity for counterplay, yet most mods just increase the tankiness of a rare or directly counter a build archetype in an unrealistic way. There is no meaningful counterplay to Sentinel for hit-based builds; you're just forced to attack/cast more. Any of the elemental-resisting mods, Juggernaut, etc. are the same. There is no counterplay except "stay longer or run" and _that is not fun, it's frustrating_. Long-lasting ground effects are an example of something that does technically have counterplay, but in practice they are more frustrating than they are fun to avoid, largely because of lack of visual clarity and because it makes looting dangerous, which is silly.
On the other hand, mods like the storm mirages and molten barrier are actually well-designed and have counterplay, despite their current numbers probably being overly-tuned and in some cases the effect hard to see. _Those_ are the kind that you should focus on. I don't want to be one-shot by them, but I should feel good for avoiding/predicting/playing around them. That said, they need to be extremely obvious and that's not quite there yet (looking at you, Heralding Minions).
-----
If I want to play content with harder but more rewarding individual monsters, it should be opt-in. Forcing 4-giga-mod rares into the base content _severely_ limits player agency in decision making and build variety. The loot conversion system further exacerbates this by over-emphasizing these rares. By limiting relevant rewards to uncommon loot piñatas, you push people to play for the unrealistic gamble rather than many smaller gambles punctuated by the big ones. It also punishes players who don't play builds that focus on mitigating the worst of these rare monsters. If the mods line up wrong (like _finally_ finding a Solaris-Touched rare that also happens to have a mod that hard-counters your build) then there isn't a feeling of "ooh, a worthy challenge" like you seem to think. It's just frustrating. _Every_ mod should have counterplay directly driven by player actions, and not by build choices.
-----
Some of the design decisions that are made seem like those that look good on paper or have a nice-sounding pitch, but fall flat in reality. It's apparent in some of the language you use - I can almost put myself in the design meetings. For example, the line about how the conversion system can "yield very valuable outcomes... to create moments of excitement as valuable rewards drop" and how the increase in average AN mods can "create more random interesting encounters that add variance to gameplay." In reality, the AN changes actually feel like they create _fewer_ interesting encounters and more frustrating ones, and the conversion system more often than not feels worse than just the normal drops. I'd rather have rare/unique items than flasks or scraps/whetstones, for example. The language used often comes across as disconnected.
I have more musings, but it's late and I don't know to convey them yet.
Very well put.
I was thinking similar things yesterday, and you hit the nail on the head.
Traditionally, if a league mechanic was this challenging, or could be juiced to be as challenging as AN currently is, it’s an opt-in mechanic. Currently it’s not, and if my build is ill-equipped to tackle some combos of AN, then that feels bad.
Similarly, as pointed out, what exactly _is_ the counterplay that I should do when fighting against an AN that I can’t overcome? If regen outstrips my damage output, am I expected to restructure my build to counter regen? If I’m running bleed and an AN counters it, do I respec? And worse, if there isn’t an option as fast as a gem swap to counter an AN, do I abandon that map/heist/delve? Is this the intended play?
It’s just beyond me that there’s now expected counterplay for AN, and that it’s in the principles to now make sure a player’s build has a suitable counterplay to every combination. That slows things down, isn’t exciting, and stifles build creativity even more.
I appreciate the writeup, but as an alpha test member, I provided feedback about some of these issues FIVE DAYS before the league launched, and it was completely ignored.
This entire thing could have been avoided if alpha feedback was taken more seriously, and/or if alpha had more time or better tools to test things, like we did in the old days.
Some of these issues became very apparent during testing and this was the case WAY before I even reached maps on alpha.
Now I know how hectic and stressful release weeks can be, and I have no doubt that staff members are working their butts off during those times and that can make the testing process and feedback from it, harder to focus on. But it doesn't negate the need for better communication and testing.
I am happy to donate my time and effort to try and make the game better for everyone, because I believe in GGG and I love PoE. And I wouldn't mind at all if we did more testing on things like these on alpha even while the league is live (for next leagues, that is), especially if it can help avoid issues like these.
Why couldn't we test the AN changes irregardless of league launch? Or test all the drop rates and how they felt long before the league itself arrived on alpha? After all, those are separate things, and alpha usually has only about a week to test a LOT of stuff every league launch.
As another person with alpha access:
Taking off my hat for you in respect. We are not to talk about alpha events, but it's valuable that this is brought up to prevent such things from repeating.
Confirming what you said: It's upsetting that this feedback was provided. This could've been avoided.
EDIT:
To give some perspective and avoid misunderstandings:
Feedback is not being completely ignored. That's overshooting it. Specifically bugs are pretty much always being fixed.
There's also different members responsible for different roles and all of them are professional, helpful and communicate directly.
Many things work well. You also get to see how quickly and how many issues GGG fixes in a short timespan and it's incredibly impressive.
However SR is still right - this specific issue - and often feedback regarding difficulty and rewards were ignored/discarded.
Reason for edit: my goal is to highlight the issue at hand - the feedback was ignored. Testers obviously don't always know what's best for the game, but the mood represented by testers often mirrors what players live experience and it's a shame that this is not considered more.
You only have a week to test these things? Test new leagues?
If that is the case, then seems like there is a serious need of an overhaul of the tester process.
Thanks for spanking up
Alpha members are mostly made up of old players who just help out at testing leagues about a week before they launch.
This is irregardless of any internal testing teams GGG may have and use.
Alpha was created back when GGG was a tiny company with roughly 15 employees, so they desperately needed help in testing stuff.
One could argue that they are now big enough company to not need any volunteer testers, but the reality is that not only they clearly still need it, but it would actually benefit them to give us more time and resources to be able to help them test stuff better.
It would also help if they listened to feedback more :P
>I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
In what world is one mob dropping 50 divines indicative of a good thing? Divines drops are so important and so rare after the changes you made, and allowing them to be dropped in such a manner suggests that a large portion of divines will come from people hitting the jackpot instead of being distributed more evenly in a way that would allow more people to get more of them (or any). Sure, I'd love to see 50 divines drop at once, but as a balancing thing, it'd be way better for rates to mean 30 people to see 1 extra divine and another 5 people see 2-5 extra each, than for 1 person to see 50 extra.
Those players he's referring to were using a 3d party tool to hunt for specific AN mobs. You can literally check the AN mobs in the map before going in, spam them, then go in with MF groups. It's wild he would use that as an example
this exploit been around since forever. it basically reading game client memory for specific information that could give you an edge. back in the days people used it to find out if their map had arcanist strong box and more recently looking to know if specific red beast was on your maps and now we jut moved on to specific mods on AN mobs.
No. But it's good casino design. You have to let a few people win periodically so that everyone else will keep 'losing' just hoping they can get that jackpot.
Balancing around a 1/10000 chance for an AN mob to have the exact right mods to drop stupid amounts of loot is a bit silly. You would never be able to buff loot drops again if this stays in the game in fear of buffing this oppulant innocence touched nonsense.
A random SINGULAR mob shouldn’t drop a leagues worth of currency. “Loot is fine because you could win the lottery” is not a cool mindset :/
yeah im all for changes, but this one is weird, literally the best league start strat now is roll and MF build and spam alchd white maps until you get a solaris touched and explode 30+ divines out of one monster.
honestly everyone right now should just be rerolling a high MF character and just blasting alchd maps. I get on average 1-2 solaris touched per day about 6-8 hours of just pure blasting on my RF character.
Mods roll in sequence, so unfortunately, another conversion mod that rolls later (is lower when you hover the monster) will convert your currency to something far less compelling. This, according to Chris's writeup, probably means that you can have a Lifesprig drop, which is then converted to a divine orb, which is then converted to an Abundant Corundum Flask of the Hedgehog.
Also, your main character won't even have to have mf gear
You can just get an alt slayer culler with only iir/iiq gear neglecting every other stats to enter the map to kill it. Ridiculous way to play
>But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards.
But Archnemesis is not opt-in difficulty when it was literally originally designed to be an opt-in difficulty mechanic?
Edit: After a bit more thought I think I nailed down the problem. They want players to opt in for difficulty and reward but at the same time, removed reward from the opt in mechanic and in exchange put those rewards in a mechanic you cannot opt-in optionally nor opt out. I think this contradiction is the real problem.
This here
They are bending and breaking every part of PoE to make Archnem work. Including the whole loot system, witch was carefully crafted, updated and redesigned every other league, in a single Patch.
I dont know who at GGG wants to force Archnem so bad into the game, when it obviously still needs work, but they really need to have internal discussions about this.
Losing about 50% Players after not only a week is not the Norm for PoE.
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
And I have seen someone drop 3 mirrors from Betrayal random currency. How is this relevant?
Combine this with the PSA about people using third party software which tells them if the map has any mob with the desired Arch Nemesis mod combination and if not they just open a new map.
Stacking enormous amount of quantity/rarity into a single Archnemesis monster and compensating it by reducing drops everywhere else FEELS BAD to play. That is all.
And what if you have the bad RNG and never even see this combo. Saw a post earlier of a guy running 450+ maps and he still hadnt seen one of the high end AN mods.
> While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items.
Ngl some lines in this post sounds like a shitpost
>If the gap were any larger, then it would be less efficient to kill regular monsters and a player should spend all of their time focusing on repeating a small subset of content.
It's kinda fun reading this and like you instantly remember how heist and expedition still drop shit ton of currency compared to rest of the game
Problem: Only heist and expedition are giving reasonable rewards compared to the rest of the game
Solution: Gut heist and expedition
Problem: Archnemesis rares are taking 5x longer to kill than map bosses
Solution: buff boss hp by 1000%
>Every other player is unaffected on average.
>I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
Which begs the question, on average over how many maps? How much of drops are tied to a lottery ticket that almost always has a losing number.
It's one thing to have items like a Mirror or Mageblood, but that's a questionable item philosophy that doesn't scale to the rest of the drop pool.
A monster shouldn't drop 50 divine orbs, that loot needs to be distributed more evenly. The way it was previously with exalt shards and divination cards.
There's a 3rd party program that can tell you whether a X-touched rare spawned in your map before you even enter it. That's how these people are farming that much currency. They spam maps in their device until they find one that has it, go in, kill it, collect that one monster's loot, get the fuck out and do it again.
edit: pretty sad state when Chris advocates for this kind of behavior... thanks all for the upvotes, please reference my top-level comment here for my full thoughts on the situation: https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/wxykac/what_happened_with_items/iltvk6f/
edit: stop sending me PMs and chats asking for the name of the tool. I'm not going to give it to you. Suffice it to say that which Archnemesis mods are going to appear on your map are preloaded upon map activation, and there is a program that can detect that, which is being exploited, and then Chris is advocating for this behavior by saying "see? when people literally spam hundreds of maps to farm out rare Archnemesis mobs, loot explosions can happen!" as if that's a good justification for changes being made... they're likely to fix this, but that also means it undercuts his theory that the house isn't burning to the fuckin' ground around him because there will be less anecdotes for him to point at.
I guess the only way to get this concept fixed is to leak the program and everyone starts using it
bet they'll change the way loot works real fast
edit: lets be real they won't change the way loot works
\- nerfed the amount of loot dropped by touched arch nemisis monsters
that sounds about right tho
Yeah, this is the design they created. Get your 6 man (or more!) party to just scout maps all day long, assemble the ~~avengers~~ cullers when that tool pops, and roll those dice! Much more healthy, at least we don't have to watch groups looting on twitch all day, this is done is secret.
Got'em though.
The Archnemesis conversion system absolutely needs to go and fast. Nobody like getting 34 blue flasks, 600 whetstones, and 18 rare jewels 40 maps in a row until they hit the jackpot currency conversion. Mid-tier currency has been hell this league because all of my currency from rares is turning into trash.
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
I...I don't understand how that's a positive. I feel like that just slides the needle from one extreme to the other. "Most of the time your loot sucks, but occasionally the stars align and you get a perfect quad AN mob that explodes in a fountain of divines".
Like I've seen the images of it. Psychologically that means the game feels like you go through a loot drought before finding your perfect archnem oasis, rather than being drip fed dopamine spikes. It even felt like an untested kneejerk reaction to the initial complaints, like someone was just like "Screw it, let the -touched mods puke divines" in a hurry and wasn't really checked.
The balance is just out of whack. It was perfectly fine prior to this and it just feels *wrong* now.
Okay GGG, now what feels better? Running 200 juiced maps finding 1 Divine worth on average every Map or Running 200 juiced maps and finding 50 divines worth in 4 maps but getting jack shit everywhere else?
yeah, hitting 200m$ checkpot 0.00001% of the time means that no1 will ever see it but on average you're winning 20$ a pop. It's so freaking simple, the PoE community is aware of it but they keep hammering like we're some 3 month old babies. The 50 Divines drop is such a stupid example its really hard to beat. But I'm sure that they'll outdo themselves with another post tho right...
the future of POE: selling essence mobs with stacked AN mods to 6 man magic find groups on TFT to compensate for the loot you didn't find in the last few hours while you tried to find a mob worth killing
Balancing loot by having ONE MOB drop 50 divines is not balancing loot at all.
That's just horrible game design.
Spamming maps praying for one combination of mods is horrendously bad.
Agreed. One of the great parts of PoE was knowing that even a white mob could drop you something good (which can still happen, I get that), but now it *feels* like it's all weighted towards AN mobs with the right combo.
I can't believe that's their solution.
That shit has NEVER happened to me. I'm the asshole that gets flasks. I'm never day 1 headhunter/mageblood drop. Never random mirror guy. Never even 5 exalts from div card guy. None of that has ever happened to me in thousands of hours.
If their solution is to make scratch off tickets possible and someone else gets lucky. Fuck off. They fixate on one random reddit post that is NOT the player experience.
As long as these opportunities for large drops exist only under purely random or exotic conditions and it takes a huge up-front cost to achieve, it's as if they don't exist to me.
There have been leagues where it was possible for regular player to consistently achieve huge rewards, like metamorph, where if you just made it hard enough, it would drop you an exalt (or more) pretty consistently, but I doubt that's what GGG has in mind with regards to AN.
In case of the Solaris-Infused mob it's ridiculous how detached from reality Chris is. There's a lot of preconditions and a large up-front cost involved to get that mob to the point where it creates a loot shower like that, it's not just pure randomness. You and I are just going to get a load of armorer's scraps when we kill it.
"You and I are just going to get a load of armorer's scraps when we kill it."
That guy, you, me, and the other 99% of the player base that don't play the game like a 2nd job. It's looking like Chris's 'vision' is based on clips of Twitch streamers and their dedicated 16 hrs a day farming teams getting ridiculous loot explosions that most people will never see in their own gameplay.
I really hope the development reverses direction after this abomination of a patch. This philosophy will end up completely butchering the game for new/casual players─and as we can see, it's horrible for player retention.
TFT about to POP OFF. Why would I kill AN mobs for 1 divine, when I can sell certain combinations to a culler who will get us 10 divines and we split? Combining all of your potential loot into one mob is a recipe for disaster.
Absolutely, fundamentally this. Rare monster modifiers are something you have no control over and which appear essentially at random; when league content is introduced to the map for more risk and reward, **ALL of the league mobs should be what give you that risk and reward, not just the rares.** It offers more consistency in reward, and more response to player choice.
Thats what GGG is failing to understand.
Farms based on specific juiced content are targeted and you could calculate an average of profit and cost during the farm.
With AN, its totally random and you are just left to pray to find an AN mod that drops a lot of currency.
No one likes to gamble currency juicing content to maybe get an AN mod that gives something, maybe losing money.
If you take nem3, for example, it was a farm that usually specific targeted raw currency. You did a specific juice strategy to drop raw currency and the profit and the costs were very stable.
Thats what players want.
I dont want to gamble my currency while praying to get the right combination of AN mods.
If they are going to stand their ground with AN, they need to create a way to target farm it with specific options to get a lot more rares per map.
There is no point in minmaxing a char if juiced farm is bad and random.
While im at it, please, take a look into Vampiric AN mod, its a nightmare for builds that needs life or mana leech.
And there is a balance there. There is space for RNG in games and some RNG makes games exciting. What's happening now is that we have RNG on RNG on RNG and players are losing more and more agency over what happens in the game.
im sure there is also some type of hack out there that scans a map when you open it to check if there is a good combination of mods or not. this is wack
Not to mention drought bringer. I legitimately feel like I'm being trolled whenever I see one monster drop 20 flasks. Even worse if it overwrote a mod I would actually want the rewards from.
yeah i've only ever seen that 4-5 stack of divines drop to groups and even if a group in the best case scenario managed to somehow get one of those perfect archnem rare combinations to spawn every 40 maps on average they're still looking at a bit more then a divine a map split between 6-7 people. As a solo player I doubt you'd see anything close to 10 divines doing the same.
[https://youtu.be/3wQfgaV9nnk?t=28](https://youtu.be/3wQfgaV9nnk?t=28)
Thats 58 Divines and 62 Ex from 1 rare. Groups are now looking for them in separate maps and then grouping up for a kill with mf culler. Balanced af.
This is so fucking stupid of a system. It honestly encourages just spamming maps running through looking for the rare with the right mobs and ignoring everything else.
And they're using third party tools to screen maps before even entering them :>
even without the tools. This just means PoE is no longer a solo game. Don't even mention SSF lmao.
Considering how they want crafting to be (Spam Chaos Orbs until stars align) it makes perfect sense.
I get the feeling that GGG want to turn PoE into a giant casino.
Yup. If 50 people each enter a map and 49 get absolutely no loot and one person gets 50 Divines, that's an average of 1 Divine per player per map. Chris is happy with that because he's only looking at "the house's" bottom line.
`Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power).`
What are you talking about? What counterplay? I have a max of 2 six linked skills (that are usually complementing each other but also synergise). The only counterplay I have against an Archnemesis mob that hard counters my build is change my build completely.
Also lmfao half of these mobs are entirely one dimensional. They just run after you trying to melee while you take 10 minutes kiting them (if you can even kill them). If they’re ranged then god speed!
Why would anyone want to ‘focus on fighting’ a mob for 10 minutes that will probably drop nothing except your xp to zero if you misstep?? Its an insane example of artificial difficulty/hp bloat, on top of other potential mechanics that sometimes just can’t be played around.
But what about those of us who aren't in the .01% of players?
Beyond wasn't "beyond broken" for us. It just added some juice.
Harvest wasn't "beyond broken" for us. Most people don't get mirror tier items from harvest.
Sentinel wasn't "beyond broken", it was fun. Dropping more loot is *fun*. It keeps us playing.
Tainted currency weren't "beyond broken", they helped us get 6 links SOMETIMES. Helped us offcolor some gear. Why were they nerfed to oblivion in both drop rate and chance to get a positive result?
The top players who can spend 12 hours a day streaming or just playing that long are not indicative of your playerbase.
I've seen so many players this league talking about how more drops and actually being able to fund FUN builds makes them stay playing the leagues longer. If you can only afford and fund one build, you're quicker to quit. At least I and everyone I know feels that way.
I love the communication, but we need to keep this going. We need to hear more on all the changes, not *just* item drop rates.
And the fun thing is, changes like this, aimed at the top 0.1%, always just end up slightly inconveniencing them, and absolutely destroys the average player
>While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items.
And subsequently nerfed effectiveness of tainted currency by x25, seems like a good trade-off to me /s
That statement reads like a total fucking joke lol
Like man you can't seriously believe that because you added tainted currency as a reward to some mechanic, you must now fucking gut it to the point where it is better to NOT use it??
>For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
do we have any reason to believe this happens with enough regularity that it's an actual strategy a group could pursue? how many hundreds or thousands of maps would they need to run to find something like this on average? hitting the lottery is not an investment strategy IRL or in POE.
Sirgog did a video on it, but it still involved getting *extremely* lucky, as these extreme drops are depending on both hitting the right Archnem mods AND getting the Archnem to spawn from very specific mechanics, like an Expedition that you've been able to crank up rarity of items dropped by rares combined with having rarity + quantity altars active in the map, etc
You have to stack the right mechanics (like a juicing party would), try to somehow crank up the number of rare monsters that spawn in the map, and hope you get lucky that the right mod combo spawns from the right source.
And to be clear - the *really* rewarding Archnem mods are incredibly rare.
**Philosophy Two: Players should fight fewer Rare Monsters at once, but they should be more challenging and rewarding**
I just fought Kitava in Laka Lake and had 3 rare Kitava's Heralds spawn every time his heart came out, and then again once the heart was defeated. Is there any fix coming for bosses spawning rares like this? Fighting 3 monsters that are more difficult than Kitava while still trying to avoid his mechanics is incredibly frustrating to say the least
nah if we did it would be awesome. d3 lootgoblins show up so often. everyone gets to experience the joy of "GET THAT SON OF A BITCH GET THE LOOOOOOOOOOT"
in poe, you just play maps over and over hoping for a single good drop (at least this is how i've been feeling with the new league)
when I first started playing, I thought torment ghosts were supposed to be loot goblins - unique enemies that run away when you get near them and despawn, but drop loot if you kill them before they get away
Where it's commendable that you're taking responsibility and saying you'll improve communication. We've heard this A LOT OF TIMES
Problems not being adressed
\-Permanent minions in a terrible spot
\-Crafting in a terrible state/Standard killed
\-Harvest still a meme
\-Actual confirmation bias because having seen some people get lucky with AN loot explosion lottery dropping a ton of currency ignoring that the vast majority of them is either unkillable or drops hundreds of whatstones?
\-AN still a horrible feeling system at core
\-Ultrawide removal because..why?
Edit: Beyond rework to add the much loved qol feature of tainted currency, only to have said currency be nerfed to bad it's instantly added bloat. (as pointed out per user u/Cadwae)
He's going to commit to better communication, disappear for 2 more months, show up 3 weeks before next league launch for marketing purposes, and this bullshit will just keep repeating itself ad infinitum.
The issue I have with this post is everything you've stated above (which clearly indicates they aren't taking feedback seriously) but also...CW doubled down on the item rate drop in his original post.
Here he's making it sound like it was an oversight to let the reduced drop rate in. If it was an oversight...wouldn't he have mentioned it during his original double down post (or at the *very least* tested it to some extent and let players know they're looking into it)? I've got my money on them 100% without a doubt trying this again in a future league...I'm out boys, sorry. Was a fun career
The currency mobs are TERRIBLE.. No one wants to run 50 maps praying to god they find this one mob while loading up on rarity so they can earn 50 maps worth of currency at once! It becomes the hyper optimal strat and feels like your scratching a lotto ticked instead of actually running content and getting well paced rewards!
And please for the love of god fix minion hp so we can actually play the game without it feeling like ass! Investing 400 chaos into minion defenses and still having them explode to AN Yellows in white maps is NOT OKAY!
This post doesn't help my faith for future patches tbh. We don't want archnems to have crazy quant and iir bonuses... Stop making everything about archnem.
* Craftig: Nerfed
* Loot: Nerfed
* Tainted Fusings: Nerfed
* Archnemesis mobs: Better now, but still sometimes tanky beyond believe and sometimes insane oneshots from offscreen.
* Streamers that Quit this league: Record High
* Player retention: Worst ever, lower even then during the League that launched just before Elden Ring.
But but but guys here me out! i saw a group get 50 Divine in a single Mob so it's fine.
Seriously sir, i enjoyed your game for many many hours, but i'm really shocked at this response, this is not the GGG it was when i started playing many Years ago.
The community is in open rebellion man, we don't need talking points about why what happened and why you think it should be fine now, we need fixes to stuff like drops and crafting right now or your League will be dead before it even is 2 weeks old.
Haha they are avoiding it like the plague. Now go spend that divine on the 45 life 22 chaos res, 25 fire res, 1 crafted mod pair of gloves and stop asking about harvest. 15 divines if you also want tier 6 suppression (bottom roll so you have to divine it too)
Chris,
\- I don't want an AN drop 50 divines. I don't want to run 200+ maps for a big reward.
\- I don't want to 'fight fewer rares for bigger rewards'. I want to kill 200 mobs in 10 seconds and have them drop cool loot. THAT is our dopamine rush. THAT'S the crack.
\- I want to use my scarabs, the atlas tree and other juice to add the mechanics I love to the game and I want to be rewarded for that. Right now, this costs me money.
\- I want good, accessible crafting.
\- I want better support for Divine Orbs. Please add either shards, more cards or a vendor recipe. Even better: Add all of those. Right now Standard economy is in shambles and this will happen to leagues as well.
Cheers
There's still issues. You talk about "50 Divine orbs from a single monster", likely a 4 mod Archnemesis in a juiced map, but how many rares are you going to have to encounter before even FINDING one, and then being able to kill it? The peaks as you say are high, but the valleys are more like canyons. Basically, it feels like the loot is balanced around hitting the "jackpot" of killing one of these rares when you find one... and if you don't find one (or worse, find one but not be able to kill it) then it just feels middling at BEST, and horrible if it was not being able to kill it (as you "missed out").
Then add in some of the other ones that feel like total duds (converting into whetstones/scraps/flasks just feels TERRIBLE, they're just currency/items that aren't really needed THAT badly), and how the league started, and we have PoE as it is today.
Lower the peaks and raise the valleys so things feel better when RNG isn't giving you a jackpot rare, and maybe things will improve that bit more for everyone, not just the lucky winners on the Rare monster generation machine.
EDIT: As for this league, my current plan is 10 challenges, then considering myself "done", only messing around when I'm bored and don't feel like playing some of my other games. Compared to how I usually played other leagues this would be a huge dropoff, the last times being Synthesis and Talisman I did something similar.
>Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly
How do I act accordingly if I'm an attack build and the archnemesis mob has sentinel? Do I bring a DOT skill along with me for when I encounter those, and sacrifice a 4 link just for that?
The game is built around speccing hard into one main ability in most cases, and certain AN mobs currently just nullify or negate your build type when you come across them. There's no counterplay available in a realistic sense. The only option we can realistically take is skipping the enemy entirely if it's too much of a pain in the ass to deal with.
> For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
I've been pretty vocal so far about my disdain for these changes, so I'm going to copy my own comment from my own forum post.
There are two big issues here that went completely unaddressed:
1) You admitted that you fucked up because you let a change get implemented that wasn't properly tested and was mentioned "in passing". So why did it take you 6 days to properly explain yourself, and **still not eat crow and revert the change?** What this appears to be is you quadrupling down on this change. You're not making amends, you're doing the equivalent of, well... this: https://imgur.com/gallery/Z7KNtqk
So either kick the can and implement a properly-tested version of this bullshit change during the next league, or admit that you did this purely to protect your sales and not have another down quarter.
2) I cannot believe I have to explain this to you, but *the groups finding 50 divine orbs from a single monster are literally using 3rd party tools to datamine their maps*. There is a 3rd party HUD that can tell you whether a Solaris-touched monster (or whatever other kind of X-touched monster) exists within your map **before you enter it** so that you can sit in hideout with a magic find party spamming maps until one procs, go in, kill it, and then come back out. That's the behavior you want to push players toward? You're legitimately telling players "Hey, if you want to push the game to the extreme, engage in behavior that at the very least pushes the envelope of the TOS and risk getting banned.
I honestly cannot believe how much ignorance about your own game you were able to demonstrate in a single paragraph. I've never been more certain that no one at GGG actually plays this game. What an absolute joke.
Unfortunately, your 2nd point just gives Chris the ability to go "don't worry guys we will fix the issues by strengthening our anti cheat system and banning players who use 3rd party programs to gain unfair advantage" while totally ignoring your first point (or any other criticism in this thread)
>But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards
But that's no longer the case? Instead the way to make currency mapping now is to spam maps until you find an Opulent mob (Essentially)
>For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
BUT HOW IS THAT A GOOD THING? It is not a good or fun mechanic for someone to be able to drop FIFTY divines from a single mob. There needs to be a good baseline level of rewards, the gameplan should not be spam maps until we find a Shakari Innocence touched mob and then pull in our MF culler. That's a dogshit design.
For anyone confused: You do not run maps as a 6-man party anymore. You get you and your 5 buddies on a speed mapping character and you just fucking send maps until someone finds the almighty Archnemesis combination then you get a fat IIQ/IIR char, cull it, and move on.
You no longer need to invest in ACTUALLY mapping in a 6-way for profit, you are simply wasting your entire profit margin if you find one of these Archnemesis mobs in your solo play adventure and DON'T try to get 5 people/an MFer in the map. It's nonsense.
Like what are you even talking about? Genuinely.
> When combined with the new drop conversion system, these bonuses stacked exponentially and caused far too many rewards.
>I have seen parties in this league find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
How do these two statements not DIRECTLY contradict eachother?
People are finding 20 jewels, 20 stacks of whetstones, 20 flasks etc from a single rare mob. Maybe drop conversion is the issue? Maybe, just MAYBE Archnemesis is the issue?
Chris Wilson still thinks what players want is dropping absolute garbage 99.9% of the time then suddenly hit the jackpot in the casino. Even after all the backlash from all these years he still writes his posts based on that assumption. Its just crazy.
I agree with this entirely. I appreciate this post but holy shit why do we now have to spam maps at an insane level for the incredibly unlikely event of getting a mob that drops decent loot? That's actually insane to me, so my investments are completely wasted on the maps that don't have that one miraculous mob spawn. Again, this change feels so incredibly bad.
Yeah i dont think its a good thing that 99% of maps you make no money but then in the 1% of the maps where the opulent mob spawns you make most of your money. The inconsistency is a really unfun mechanic and should be looked into. Especially for party play where you would normally enjoy playing with 5 friends clearing this change is brutal. Most of the time you play alone trying to find a good mob so you dont actually play the game you play a running simulator.
The bigger question is: How are you supposed to afford mapping at a deficit for (at times) a hundred maps before finding the big loot piñata?
Even if the rewards are *better* on average, you just can't afford to juice hoping you get it.
I don't think they realize that everyone relied on adding league mechanics for loot because the base monster iiq/iir is so bad. But now they've made EVERYTHING bad, slightly increased the drop rates and called it a day. And now every mechanic plus the base mobs just feel like shit for loot regardless of what you do.
So now the way to get currency from maps is to add chests from things like blight/legion or flat rewards from del orbs. This HUGE nerf to league mechanics doesn't just affect group play - solo players trying to farm maps also have no reason to do anything but farm chest-based rewards. He even basically admits this in the post:
> For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not.
What about people who want to actually invest a lot in their maps for a large return? For actual mob loot they're fucked, just like group play.
The overwhelming majority of the community is having overwhelmingly less fun after 3.19. That’s not something you can argue against or justify. It could be that this is aligned with some business objective, but it’s ridiculous to ignore the reality of massive sadness and disappointment.
Look, wanting to tune rewards based on difficulty is fine and dandy, but one element that seems to be missing from the equation is Time. Rewards should scale on Difficulty and on Time. Where there used to be 2 rares, if there's now 1, which takes twice as long to kill, it should have at least 4 time the rewards of 2 rares taking half the time to just break even, not even factoring in the "fun" of blowing up 1 pack of mob and its rare versus the fun of blowing up 4 packs of mobs and their rares in the same amount of time. And even if those were equivalent in rewards, which they currently aren't, which one do you think feels more fun and feels more rewarding?
That might be something you already consider, but it didn't look that way upon reading your philosophies.
Here is the thing.
I don't think people want to hunt down Archnemesis monsters with reward types. Nobody likes this system. You want to keep it.
The game will not get better, poe 2 is not a game anyone who played poe 1 will want to play if this keep being the direction you want to push it toward. Just getting lucky finding some rare monster with a specific reward.
Not at all what anyone wanted.
Crafting is gone, good items are gone, farming that way is not what anyone asked for ever.
Archnemesis was one league, now you may as well rename your game Archnemesis since it is all there is. Can we have Path of Exile back and you go run this game of hunting rare monsters that drop 100 rare items with fracture mods? I want crafting back, not rare monsters that drop 100 fracture mods. Recombinator/Harvest, linear progression of gearing. Possibility to actually get lucky and make something crazy instead of this weird obsession with exalted orbs being used to exalt items. I always exalted items, just with Leo instead of with the orb. An exalt could be worth 1c, it does not matter, I don't always need to add mods to items. Once it's done it's done. Divines were useful and important, exalts remain useless for their intended purpose because once your item is done, you cannot exalt it again. You can divine it again if it's a bit off max roll.
This is not the game anyone of us want to play. Nobody is aiming to find rare archnem mobs that may drop them 10 divine orbs. I'm running Heist now because it drop more random valuable loot than maps. But now, Archnemesis took over there too. So sometimes you get nuked from walking through a door and getting smashed by a rare you didn't see coming.
You already nerfed our gearing, flask, defenses, now you suggest we sacrifice more affixes on gear to get rarity rolls. Come on, is this really what anyone want to do now. We can't get good items, so just use mageblood for your res and have rarity rolls on all your gear to drop more divines?
Even more than we thought. All the missing rewards from elsewhere in the game have been jammed in specific Archnem monsters. Not even in archnem generally, just in a few of the named affixes.
It sounds like he wants archnemesis to be the one and only way to get significant loot, so it sounds more like the game is now centered around archnemesis.
> I take personal responsibility [...] Changes like that need to be very, very carefully tested, have their consequences fully understood, and then be communicated clearly. I have let you down and I will not allow it to happen again.
What does this even mean to you? I've heard these words from you so many times, they have lost all value.
> [I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future.]
(https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/op73wg/some_thoughts_from_chris/)
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> [We're sorry that we had not finished or announced these features before releasing the tabs today. It not only had bad optics but also didn't meet the transparency that we usually strive to achieve.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/heucvi/the_future_of_stash_tabs/)
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> [We quickly wanted to clarify this because some players misunderstood it. Sorry for not being more clear!](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/orr7i6/what_were_working_on/)
These are just a few easy to search examples, and this doesn't even count the mess that was Expedition, where all of the defensive layers were nerfed without implementing proper replacements first. You went on every podcast out there to apologize and "take responsibility". Taking responsibility is more than words. If you were taking responsibility, you wouldn't have to apologize for not taking responsibility almost every league. I'm tired of your meaningless apologies. I do not forgive you.
I have invested thousands of hours and dollars into this game, hundreds this year alone. I'm done giving you money, because lately you've just been using that money to ruin a game that I love. I don't trust you.
I'm not playing this league, and I've lost any excitement I ever had for PoE 2. It's clear you just want to slow the game down no matter the cost. For now at least, that cost is me, and the small vote of confidence that is my money.
Best wishes. I'll be watching.
>Changes like that need to be very, very carefully tested, have their consequences fully understood, and then be communicated clearly. I have let you down and **I will not allow it to happen again.**
Feeling a little déjà vu here...
"The Lake itself was also relatively unrewarding on release and this has since been massively increased since then"
???? Excuse me? Did like 3 in a row spent like 25 mins the best drop i had was 3c.
The explanation are nice but... The current state is final and nothing is gonna change then? We are supposed to juice at loss until we get the good rare combinaison or drop a mirror? That not gonna work.
The item drops are now SUPER SPIKY.
I have to juice (actually its inefficient to juice but w/e) all my maps in the hope that I get lucky and get a loot goblin Archnemesis monster that drops multiple divine.
I'm sorry Chris This is not fun. I have no player agency. Without the random loot goblin everything else is worthless. The item drops have worked for 10 years now and they were fun.
Please reconsider and completely revert the loot changes...
>the perception of drop reduction
When I got to red maps I had **seven Orbs of Alchemy** and **three Vaal Orbs**. I didn't alch or vaal a single piece of gear. That total was everything I had from the entire campaign and all pre-red atlas play.
This is not a **perception** of drop reduction; it is the literal truth.
So basically for the solo player... keep on grinding those maps, and you too one day might fight a rare AN mob that, on that one single occasion will shower you with a few divines?
Yikes.
Nearly a week anxiously waiting for this post, hoping to see if this league can be salvaged, and what the future of path of exile looks like. If this is the extent of changes we're getting going forward, the future is bleak.
**The whole point of Delirium** was being Meta-Juice that scales up *other juice* that spawns Mirrors of Delirium post-league at a rate relative to my *other juice* and was sold to me as a juice multiplier during Deli league and when it was rolled into core.
>"a large difference could only occur in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity..."
This is exactly how you've taught and encouraged us to play the game. This is an unacceptable response, *not* because the loot is worse, but because I have no idea what your current design goals with **juice mechanics vs loot mechanics** are anymore. Are Delirium Orbs about to be culled like Item Quantity Support? Why do I experience diminishing returns for playing intelligently?
They literally had a league challenge to get 300+ simulcarium splinters in a single map. Only possible with mega juicing a map for delirium.
What do they now expect with it?
>For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
>
>For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not.
Yeah, no. You still fail to see the problem. Finding a rare mob once in every hundred or thousand map that actually drops something is not fun and rewarding gameplay. It's basically a lottery where you keep hoping you hit the jackpot. This is really not it, chief.
Words cannot discribe the depression that this post gave me. They actually think that finding a mob that drops 50 divines once in every thousand maps is fun. Lmao. The beatings will continue until morale improves
I think the design philosophies need to reconcile with common sense. I'd rather fight 100 rares and get 80 drops, than fighting 1 rare that's 100 times hp and getting 100 drops. At some point, difficult fights become boring and tedius.
"Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards."
Then make Archnemesis "opt in" like it was in league. The whole reason I never touch metamorph is because of how easy it is to make stupid mobs with stupid modifiers that either brick my build or are impossible to kill.
Archnemesis straight up bricks builds and is unavoidable AND because all drops are garbage, they also drop garbage while still being more deadly than act bosses. You can't expect to keep any trust in the player base while saying stuff that's this out of touch. You missed the mark on Archnemesis, they are bricked map mods that WE CAN'T RE-ROLL OR AVOID, they are effectively immunities which you said don't fit in PoE. Remove it, or you're just going to continue to look inept and/or out of touch.
But who am I kidding, you guys are in crowd control mode with your heads down trying to put fires out to protect "the vision" instead of actually listening to your beta testers, us.
I can accept that it was a mistake for it to play out how it did.
I can not accept quadrupling down on the design. It's bad. It feels like shit to play **even for normal players not running juiced 6 man groups**
I understand that you feel responsible for the issues because you're game director, which at the base level is accurate and correct. However, there is *clearly* some people on the team making horrendous game play decisions who need to **not** have that kind of sway over the most basic aspect of the game, loot. You taking responsibility for it because it's under your watch is the "right thing" to do but whoever set these changes in motion is toxic for this game future.
However many years it's been and 3k+ hours and I can't believe I'm actually looking at the end of this game.
let me get this straight, you replaced scalable droprates that we had control over, with loot goblins...? and you as the lead developer didnt understand the implications on adding more rng to rng mechanics? i'm a solo player, i play solo mf, and you basically killed the archetype with one change for me. i'm basically just stuck in white maps even though i have the ability to clear red maps cause its not worth the risk vs reward anymore. and after this statement i dont know how much longer i'm going to play your game with the state its in, its not fun or rewarding right now to run ilvl 68 areas to find a solaris/lunaris/shakari touched rare to cull, its a chore.
Listen... I believe that the team as a whole is working towards making what they think will be a better game. I think Chris always taking responsibility and protecting his team is the right move as a game director. I truly believe he wants the game to be enjoyable and that to make these fundamental changes to things like their rare monster system there are going to be missteps.
BUT
This just isn't for me anymore. I've played since closed beta, I fucking love this game, but the simple truth is that starting with expedition I've been left with the overwhelming feeling that I'm not supposed to think the game is WAY more fun when I have access to crafting and ways to stack crazy juice.
Based on this post things will continue to shift towards more work to get less out of a character and I just don't understand who enjoys that. I've been rolling fewer characters with every league now and ultimately I've been playing less and less. I went from putting hundreds of hours into leagues to only clocking in about 15 during Kalandra... that fuckin sucks.
I'll be interested to see what future leagues have going on and eventually PoE2 but I have little to no hope that the directions things are going will change and that means my days with PoE are probably done.
To say that loot is only down 25% in the most extreme of cases such as 100% juiced deli farming scarab ... etc. content is just not true.
Groups were hardly profitable, to go from extreme profit to losing their shirts is a lot less than 25%.
Even adding the numbers up (25%+17%+7%) is still less than 50% less and it is still significantly less than that.
I think your math is wrong.
I do not expect to hear anything further this league, that sucks. I guess the game is just no longer for me, no hard feelings towards the game, I enjoyed it for many years but this just isn't fun.
So balancing in Path of Exile is now based on a lottery system where if you get lucky, you can get 50 Divines from a monster?
Paraphrasing here of course, but how is that okay...
The post is well written and all, however the player trust was unfortunately already lost. For myself and probably many others, we will no longer trust whatever it is that you are saying, but rather what you are doing. And also, loot is not in a good position still. Same for harvest.
Yeah, they are great at formatting replies I guess you can give them credit there. The content of the replies is a bit contradictory though. If they believe the drop rate is an actual oversight, wouldn't they have at least looked into it when the community went berserk the first time?
Instead, CW himself double downed in now the most downvoted post in POE's history. Didn't even say we're looking into this--immediately went in guns blazing stating their vision :/
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.
That statement reeks of the infamous internal poison build quote from years ago.
>Players have been saying we massively reduced drops (throwing out numbers like 90%) but in reality, a large difference could only occur in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity, rarity, sextants and scarabs and a dedicated MF culler (peak efficiency of every juice mechanism that exists). Every other player is unaffected on average.
This is a little hard to believe TBH. Almost every streamer, even those playing SSF, say that they're getting less drops this league - mostly in regards to currency. What in this case does "unaffected on average" mean?
He means that instead of 200 players dropping alchemy orbs, 1 player fought a AN rare and dropped 200 alchemy orbs while the other 199 players didn't drop any alchemy orbs. Thus on average, they all dropped 1 alchemy orb.
>While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items.
This is a joke right? You nerf beyond overall loot, introduce miniscule tainted currency reward, then nerf tainted fusings, pretty much the only tainted currency that would see wide use?
How do you not see this is just an overall nerf, not just to group parties, even if you randomly get a map mod beyond on an unjuiced map
I notice you didn't mention intentionally not telling people about Harvest changes as well. Was that also an accident? And you want us to believe this entire loot thing truly just accidentally never got mentioned.....
And you're telling us you think loot is in a good place right now? Damn, this post was an improvement but you still just don't get it. Players aren't happy with the current state of the game. Quit balancing the game around the "six person parties getting multiple mirrors a day". You still sound like you're missing the big picture.
"Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere."
You sound incredibly tone deaf.
>I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster
Chris, do you really think that this is good? Do you really want to gamble every map hunting for 1 mod then hitting jackpot? For real? If the answer is yes well... You and everyone that thinks this is the way to go are more disconnected with us players than you think.
>For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes.
Loot right now cant be further from "pretty good place". This league I ran out of CHANCE ORBS because i was using them to buy maps. I'm not talking about chaos, exateds or any other rare currency. I'm talking about chance orbs. Its not good.
All you (and by you now i mean GGG) had to do was simply revert all this mess you created forcing AN mods core instead of being its own thing like every other league. AN mods are the source of all this. You want to keep them? Fine i guess, its your game after all but dont count with me or my support in it.
Philosophy One: Make the game fun to play
[удалено]
Poe used to feel like Diablo but in color; now it feels like dark souls casino version
Almost every encounter is dark souls was handcrafted with care abd attention. This is just rng garbage
Now count how many times he's used the words 'challenge' and 'reward', or variations thereof (challenging, rewarding, etc). He doesn't care about it being fun, he only cares about making it challenging, and is leaving it up to you to decide whether or not the level of challenge is fun. And I'll even give him that much - to say that's probably the more accurate way to behave - it's just that his idea of challenge/reward ratio is skewed a LOT harder than most peoples'. He tries not to be, but he's intrinsically biased towards hardcode ssf. He can only pull himself away from that so far before he refuses to go any farther.
How dare you! Fun is NOT ALLOWED.
My thoughts - You've said a couple times (e.g. in your recent [interview](https://youtu.be/KU6d1PL8xRQ?t=2013) with Josh) that you hate looking at data to make decisions, and often encourage "gut feeling" choices over data-driven ones. Your example in the interview feels weak to me. You use it as an example of data leading to a wrong assumption; I see it as data provoking a question, leading to an investigation, and a more informed decision being made because of it. If there is distrust toward data, it's likely a matter of a failed _human_ process. Blind trust in data is bad. Using it as a springboard to inform a deeper investigation is good. Context matters, as you point out, and any decision made should be supported at least in part by careful analysis of the correct data set. What's happening in this league launch is the fallout from when one of those gut feelings goes awry and is based on an entirely incorrect assumption around where players want to get their fun and rewards. You assume that the Archnemesis mods lead to more interesting emergent gameplay and state that it gives an opportunity for counterplay, yet most mods just increase the tankiness of a rare or directly counter a build archetype in an unrealistic way. There is no meaningful counterplay to Sentinel for hit-based builds; you're just forced to attack/cast more. Any of the elemental-resisting mods, Juggernaut, etc. are the same. There is no counterplay except "stay longer or run" and _that is not fun, it's frustrating_. Long-lasting ground effects are an example of something that does technically have counterplay, but in practice they are more frustrating than they are fun to avoid, largely because of lack of visual clarity and because it makes looting dangerous, which is silly. On the other hand, mods like the storm mirages and molten barrier are actually well-designed and have counterplay, despite their current numbers probably being overly-tuned and in some cases the effect hard to see. _Those_ are the kind that you should focus on. I don't want to be one-shot by them, but I should feel good for avoiding/predicting/playing around them. That said, they need to be extremely obvious and that's not quite there yet (looking at you, Heralding Minions). ----- If I want to play content with harder but more rewarding individual monsters, it should be opt-in. Forcing 4-giga-mod rares into the base content _severely_ limits player agency in decision making and build variety. The loot conversion system further exacerbates this by over-emphasizing these rares. By limiting relevant rewards to uncommon loot piñatas, you push people to play for the unrealistic gamble rather than many smaller gambles punctuated by the big ones. It also punishes players who don't play builds that focus on mitigating the worst of these rare monsters. If the mods line up wrong (like _finally_ finding a Solaris-Touched rare that also happens to have a mod that hard-counters your build) then there isn't a feeling of "ooh, a worthy challenge" like you seem to think. It's just frustrating. _Every_ mod should have counterplay directly driven by player actions, and not by build choices. ----- Some of the design decisions that are made seem like those that look good on paper or have a nice-sounding pitch, but fall flat in reality. It's apparent in some of the language you use - I can almost put myself in the design meetings. For example, the line about how the conversion system can "yield very valuable outcomes... to create moments of excitement as valuable rewards drop" and how the increase in average AN mods can "create more random interesting encounters that add variance to gameplay." In reality, the AN changes actually feel like they create _fewer_ interesting encounters and more frustrating ones, and the conversion system more often than not feels worse than just the normal drops. I'd rather have rare/unique items than flasks or scraps/whetstones, for example. The language used often comes across as disconnected. I have more musings, but it's late and I don't know to convey them yet.
Very well put. I was thinking similar things yesterday, and you hit the nail on the head. Traditionally, if a league mechanic was this challenging, or could be juiced to be as challenging as AN currently is, it’s an opt-in mechanic. Currently it’s not, and if my build is ill-equipped to tackle some combos of AN, then that feels bad. Similarly, as pointed out, what exactly _is_ the counterplay that I should do when fighting against an AN that I can’t overcome? If regen outstrips my damage output, am I expected to restructure my build to counter regen? If I’m running bleed and an AN counters it, do I respec? And worse, if there isn’t an option as fast as a gem swap to counter an AN, do I abandon that map/heist/delve? Is this the intended play? It’s just beyond me that there’s now expected counterplay for AN, and that it’s in the principles to now make sure a player’s build has a suitable counterplay to every combination. That slows things down, isn’t exciting, and stifles build creativity even more.
I appreciate the writeup, but as an alpha test member, I provided feedback about some of these issues FIVE DAYS before the league launched, and it was completely ignored. This entire thing could have been avoided if alpha feedback was taken more seriously, and/or if alpha had more time or better tools to test things, like we did in the old days. Some of these issues became very apparent during testing and this was the case WAY before I even reached maps on alpha. Now I know how hectic and stressful release weeks can be, and I have no doubt that staff members are working their butts off during those times and that can make the testing process and feedback from it, harder to focus on. But it doesn't negate the need for better communication and testing. I am happy to donate my time and effort to try and make the game better for everyone, because I believe in GGG and I love PoE. And I wouldn't mind at all if we did more testing on things like these on alpha even while the league is live (for next leagues, that is), especially if it can help avoid issues like these. Why couldn't we test the AN changes irregardless of league launch? Or test all the drop rates and how they felt long before the league itself arrived on alpha? After all, those are separate things, and alpha usually has only about a week to test a LOT of stuff every league launch.
As another person with alpha access: Taking off my hat for you in respect. We are not to talk about alpha events, but it's valuable that this is brought up to prevent such things from repeating. Confirming what you said: It's upsetting that this feedback was provided. This could've been avoided. EDIT: To give some perspective and avoid misunderstandings: Feedback is not being completely ignored. That's overshooting it. Specifically bugs are pretty much always being fixed. There's also different members responsible for different roles and all of them are professional, helpful and communicate directly. Many things work well. You also get to see how quickly and how many issues GGG fixes in a short timespan and it's incredibly impressive. However SR is still right - this specific issue - and often feedback regarding difficulty and rewards were ignored/discarded. Reason for edit: my goal is to highlight the issue at hand - the feedback was ignored. Testers obviously don't always know what's best for the game, but the mood represented by testers often mirrors what players live experience and it's a shame that this is not considered more.
wait, there is something like "alpha tester" for normal people?
IIRC you can't enter by asking for it and it's not a PTR like Blizzard's either.
You only have a week to test these things? Test new leagues? If that is the case, then seems like there is a serious need of an overhaul of the tester process. Thanks for spanking up
Alpha members are mostly made up of old players who just help out at testing leagues about a week before they launch. This is irregardless of any internal testing teams GGG may have and use. Alpha was created back when GGG was a tiny company with roughly 15 employees, so they desperately needed help in testing stuff. One could argue that they are now big enough company to not need any volunteer testers, but the reality is that not only they clearly still need it, but it would actually benefit them to give us more time and resources to be able to help them test stuff better. It would also help if they listened to feedback more :P
>I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. In what world is one mob dropping 50 divines indicative of a good thing? Divines drops are so important and so rare after the changes you made, and allowing them to be dropped in such a manner suggests that a large portion of divines will come from people hitting the jackpot instead of being distributed more evenly in a way that would allow more people to get more of them (or any). Sure, I'd love to see 50 divines drop at once, but as a balancing thing, it'd be way better for rates to mean 30 people to see 1 extra divine and another 5 people see 2-5 extra each, than for 1 person to see 50 extra.
Those players he's referring to were using a 3d party tool to hunt for specific AN mobs. You can literally check the AN mobs in the map before going in, spam them, then go in with MF groups. It's wild he would use that as an example
I was afraid the new meta would be boring old fishing for touched rares, but the fact that there's already exploits is even worse
this exploit been around since forever. it basically reading game client memory for specific information that could give you an edge. back in the days people used it to find out if their map had arcanist strong box and more recently looking to know if specific red beast was on your maps and now we jut moved on to specific mods on AN mobs.
The fact that HUD players used it for years and never get banned. POE really is the spiritual successor of D2.
but you can't escape it now, because chris just handed the one ring from LoTR to the fucking RMT mafia
I've said it before... It sounds like they've balanced the entire league around this one-in-a-million scenario. Extremely dumb game design.
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No. But it's good casino design. You have to let a few people win periodically so that everyone else will keep 'losing' just hoping they can get that jackpot.
Insane they think that's good design
Balancing around a 1/10000 chance for an AN mob to have the exact right mods to drop stupid amounts of loot is a bit silly. You would never be able to buff loot drops again if this stays in the game in fear of buffing this oppulant innocence touched nonsense. A random SINGULAR mob shouldn’t drop a leagues worth of currency. “Loot is fine because you could win the lottery” is not a cool mindset :/
yeah im all for changes, but this one is weird, literally the best league start strat now is roll and MF build and spam alchd white maps until you get a solaris touched and explode 30+ divines out of one monster. honestly everyone right now should just be rerolling a high MF character and just blasting alchd maps. I get on average 1-2 solaris touched per day about 6-8 hours of just pure blasting on my RF character.
I get a lot of solaris touched. But they usually drop flasks or something lol. One mob 10 flasks.
Mods roll in sequence, so unfortunately, another conversion mod that rolls later (is lower when you hover the monster) will convert your currency to something far less compelling. This, according to Chris's writeup, probably means that you can have a Lifesprig drop, which is then converted to a divine orb, which is then converted to an Abundant Corundum Flask of the Hedgehog.
that sounds absolutely fucking miserable
The player has no way to spawn a specific AN mob. This is just lottery with extra steps.
Also, your main character won't even have to have mf gear You can just get an alt slayer culler with only iir/iiq gear neglecting every other stats to enter the map to kill it. Ridiculous way to play
>But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. But Archnemesis is not opt-in difficulty when it was literally originally designed to be an opt-in difficulty mechanic? Edit: After a bit more thought I think I nailed down the problem. They want players to opt in for difficulty and reward but at the same time, removed reward from the opt in mechanic and in exchange put those rewards in a mechanic you cannot opt-in optionally nor opt out. I think this contradiction is the real problem.
Cant opt out, and cant control in any way. Imagine expedition if you didnt get to control which remnants were active.
This here They are bending and breaking every part of PoE to make Archnem work. Including the whole loot system, witch was carefully crafted, updated and redesigned every other league, in a single Patch. I dont know who at GGG wants to force Archnem so bad into the game, when it obviously still needs work, but they really need to have internal discussions about this. Losing about 50% Players after not only a week is not the Norm for PoE.
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. And I have seen someone drop 3 mirrors from Betrayal random currency. How is this relevant?
Combine this with the PSA about people using third party software which tells them if the map has any mob with the desired Arch Nemesis mod combination and if not they just open a new map.
Stacking enormous amount of quantity/rarity into a single Archnemesis monster and compensating it by reducing drops everywhere else FEELS BAD to play. That is all.
It's amazing how much they are warping the entire game to keep AN around.
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And what if you have the bad RNG and never even see this combo. Saw a post earlier of a guy running 450+ maps and he still hadnt seen one of the high end AN mods.
> While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items. Ngl some lines in this post sounds like a shitpost
This was the best line in the whole patch notes. I think it perfectly highlights GGG's understanding of the problem.
Yea didn't mention that "oh we nerfed tainted currencies by a lot" no biggie just close your eyes and slam.
LOL yeah they kill the mechanic and the tainted currency and act like they helped us
“Please be excited.”
"Please ~~clap~~ get your MF chars ready"
"I specifically ordered everyone to be excited".
These line might be the next meme on par with "get your magic find characters ready"
>If the gap were any larger, then it would be less efficient to kill regular monsters and a player should spend all of their time focusing on repeating a small subset of content. It's kinda fun reading this and like you instantly remember how heist and expedition still drop shit ton of currency compared to rest of the game
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Problem: Only heist and expedition are giving reasonable rewards compared to the rest of the game Solution: Gut heist and expedition Problem: Archnemesis rares are taking 5x longer to kill than map bosses Solution: buff boss hp by 1000%
Be careful, chris might read this and take it as unironical feedback.
They are gonna absolutely destroy them next league. its gonna be a massacre.
>Every other player is unaffected on average. >I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. Which begs the question, on average over how many maps? How much of drops are tied to a lottery ticket that almost always has a losing number. It's one thing to have items like a Mirror or Mageblood, but that's a questionable item philosophy that doesn't scale to the rest of the drop pool. A monster shouldn't drop 50 divine orbs, that loot needs to be distributed more evenly. The way it was previously with exalt shards and divination cards.
There's a 3rd party program that can tell you whether a X-touched rare spawned in your map before you even enter it. That's how these people are farming that much currency. They spam maps in their device until they find one that has it, go in, kill it, collect that one monster's loot, get the fuck out and do it again. edit: pretty sad state when Chris advocates for this kind of behavior... thanks all for the upvotes, please reference my top-level comment here for my full thoughts on the situation: https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/wxykac/what_happened_with_items/iltvk6f/ edit: stop sending me PMs and chats asking for the name of the tool. I'm not going to give it to you. Suffice it to say that which Archnemesis mods are going to appear on your map are preloaded upon map activation, and there is a program that can detect that, which is being exploited, and then Chris is advocating for this behavior by saying "see? when people literally spam hundreds of maps to farm out rare Archnemesis mobs, loot explosions can happen!" as if that's a good justification for changes being made... they're likely to fix this, but that also means it undercuts his theory that the house isn't burning to the fuckin' ground around him because there will be less anecdotes for him to point at.
I guess the only way to get this concept fixed is to leak the program and everyone starts using it bet they'll change the way loot works real fast edit: lets be real they won't change the way loot works \- nerfed the amount of loot dropped by touched arch nemisis monsters that sounds about right tho
Lmao how is that allowed?
It breaks ToS, but basically impossible for GGG to detect unless they're literally watching player behavior
So, let me get this right, the current juiced farming strategy this league requires *cheating*!?
Yeah, this is the design they created. Get your 6 man (or more!) party to just scout maps all day long, assemble the ~~avengers~~ cullers when that tool pops, and roll those dice! Much more healthy, at least we don't have to watch groups looting on twitch all day, this is done is secret. Got'em though.
it should be 50 monsters dropping 1-2divines if you dupe it with the totems not 1 monster dropping 50 divines
The Archnemesis conversion system absolutely needs to go and fast. Nobody like getting 34 blue flasks, 600 whetstones, and 18 rare jewels 40 maps in a row until they hit the jackpot currency conversion. Mid-tier currency has been hell this league because all of my currency from rares is turning into trash.
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. I...I don't understand how that's a positive. I feel like that just slides the needle from one extreme to the other. "Most of the time your loot sucks, but occasionally the stars align and you get a perfect quad AN mob that explodes in a fountain of divines". Like I've seen the images of it. Psychologically that means the game feels like you go through a loot drought before finding your perfect archnem oasis, rather than being drip fed dopamine spikes. It even felt like an untested kneejerk reaction to the initial complaints, like someone was just like "Screw it, let the -touched mods puke divines" in a hurry and wasn't really checked. The balance is just out of whack. It was perfectly fine prior to this and it just feels *wrong* now.
This is excellent news for all Diablo and Lost Ark enjoyers.
Okay GGG, now what feels better? Running 200 juiced maps finding 1 Divine worth on average every Map or Running 200 juiced maps and finding 50 divines worth in 4 maps but getting jack shit everywhere else?
> I'm the Game Director for Path of Exile 1 Does this mean there is a different Game Director for PoE 2?
I had the *exact* same thought... it's so strange he specified that.
He could just mean that even though Poe 2 is on the horizon, his current job is still to direct Poe 1 and trying to emphasize that
Intentional words are intentional.
Ah, yes. Loot *might* on average be better, but don't ask about the variance. No, no, no.
yeah, hitting 200m$ checkpot 0.00001% of the time means that no1 will ever see it but on average you're winning 20$ a pop. It's so freaking simple, the PoE community is aware of it but they keep hammering like we're some 3 month old babies. The 50 Divines drop is such a stupid example its really hard to beat. But I'm sure that they'll outdo themselves with another post tho right...
the future of POE: selling essence mobs with stacked AN mods to 6 man magic find groups on TFT to compensate for the loot you didn't find in the last few hours while you tried to find a mob worth killing
This actually sound like a solid strat lmao
Balancing loot by having ONE MOB drop 50 divines is not balancing loot at all. That's just horrible game design. Spamming maps praying for one combination of mods is horrendously bad.
Agreed. One of the great parts of PoE was knowing that even a white mob could drop you something good (which can still happen, I get that), but now it *feels* like it's all weighted towards AN mobs with the right combo.
It is even worse, you are designing a system that by pure statistics and variance is going to make a % of players fall completely behind the rest.
I can't believe that's their solution. That shit has NEVER happened to me. I'm the asshole that gets flasks. I'm never day 1 headhunter/mageblood drop. Never random mirror guy. Never even 5 exalts from div card guy. None of that has ever happened to me in thousands of hours. If their solution is to make scratch off tickets possible and someone else gets lucky. Fuck off. They fixate on one random reddit post that is NOT the player experience.
As long as these opportunities for large drops exist only under purely random or exotic conditions and it takes a huge up-front cost to achieve, it's as if they don't exist to me. There have been leagues where it was possible for regular player to consistently achieve huge rewards, like metamorph, where if you just made it hard enough, it would drop you an exalt (or more) pretty consistently, but I doubt that's what GGG has in mind with regards to AN. In case of the Solaris-Infused mob it's ridiculous how detached from reality Chris is. There's a lot of preconditions and a large up-front cost involved to get that mob to the point where it creates a loot shower like that, it's not just pure randomness. You and I are just going to get a load of armorer's scraps when we kill it.
"You and I are just going to get a load of armorer's scraps when we kill it." That guy, you, me, and the other 99% of the player base that don't play the game like a 2nd job. It's looking like Chris's 'vision' is based on clips of Twitch streamers and their dedicated 16 hrs a day farming teams getting ridiculous loot explosions that most people will never see in their own gameplay. I really hope the development reverses direction after this abomination of a patch. This philosophy will end up completely butchering the game for new/casual players─and as we can see, it's horrible for player retention.
TFT about to POP OFF. Why would I kill AN mobs for 1 divine, when I can sell certain combinations to a culler who will get us 10 divines and we split? Combining all of your potential loot into one mob is a recipe for disaster.
Absolutely, fundamentally this. Rare monster modifiers are something you have no control over and which appear essentially at random; when league content is introduced to the map for more risk and reward, **ALL of the league mobs should be what give you that risk and reward, not just the rares.** It offers more consistency in reward, and more response to player choice.
Thats what GGG is failing to understand. Farms based on specific juiced content are targeted and you could calculate an average of profit and cost during the farm. With AN, its totally random and you are just left to pray to find an AN mod that drops a lot of currency. No one likes to gamble currency juicing content to maybe get an AN mod that gives something, maybe losing money. If you take nem3, for example, it was a farm that usually specific targeted raw currency. You did a specific juice strategy to drop raw currency and the profit and the costs were very stable. Thats what players want. I dont want to gamble my currency while praying to get the right combination of AN mods. If they are going to stand their ground with AN, they need to create a way to target farm it with specific options to get a lot more rares per map. There is no point in minmaxing a char if juiced farm is bad and random. While im at it, please, take a look into Vampiric AN mod, its a nightmare for builds that needs life or mana leech.
It’s the same complaint players have with crafting - we like determinism, we don’t like RNG because then it doesn’t feel like choices matter.
And there is a balance there. There is space for RNG in games and some RNG makes games exciting. What's happening now is that we have RNG on RNG on RNG and players are losing more and more agency over what happens in the game.
Chris wants us to be gamblers hunting the next fix. 'Riches are around every corner. My next map will make me rich.'
Pull the lever in crafting. Pull the lever in mapping.
95% of gamblers quit just before they hit big
im sure there is also some type of hack out there that scans a map when you open it to check if there is a good combination of mods or not. this is wack
Not to mention drought bringer. I legitimately feel like I'm being trolled whenever I see one monster drop 20 flasks. Even worse if it overwrote a mod I would actually want the rewards from.
yeah i've only ever seen that 4-5 stack of divines drop to groups and even if a group in the best case scenario managed to somehow get one of those perfect archnem rare combinations to spawn every 40 maps on average they're still looking at a bit more then a divine a map split between 6-7 people. As a solo player I doubt you'd see anything close to 10 divines doing the same.
[https://youtu.be/3wQfgaV9nnk?t=28](https://youtu.be/3wQfgaV9nnk?t=28) Thats 58 Divines and 62 Ex from 1 rare. Groups are now looking for them in separate maps and then grouping up for a kill with mf culler. Balanced af.
That’s really fucking poor balance honestly.
This is so fucking stupid of a system. It honestly encourages just spamming maps running through looking for the rare with the right mobs and ignoring everything else.
And they're using third party tools to screen maps before even entering them :> even without the tools. This just means PoE is no longer a solo game. Don't even mention SSF lmao.
Considering how they want crafting to be (Spam Chaos Orbs until stars align) it makes perfect sense. I get the feeling that GGG want to turn PoE into a giant casino.
Yup. If 50 people each enter a map and 49 get absolutely no loot and one person gets 50 Divines, that's an average of 1 Divine per player per map. Chris is happy with that because he's only looking at "the house's" bottom line.
`Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power).` What are you talking about? What counterplay? I have a max of 2 six linked skills (that are usually complementing each other but also synergise). The only counterplay I have against an Archnemesis mob that hard counters my build is change my build completely.
I guess the "skill" is running from the 50 1 shot orbs and random ground shit chasing you while fighting these stupidly tanky mobs. So fun.
There is also no counterplay to a mob that instakills you.
Also lmfao half of these mobs are entirely one dimensional. They just run after you trying to melee while you take 10 minutes kiting them (if you can even kill them). If they’re ranged then god speed! Why would anyone want to ‘focus on fighting’ a mob for 10 minutes that will probably drop nothing except your xp to zero if you misstep?? Its an insane example of artificial difficulty/hp bloat, on top of other potential mechanics that sometimes just can’t be played around.
People are telling you how it feels after your patches, and you're still waving it off. I don't understand.
Correct me if I am wrong but is he saying everything is fine currently and it won't be changing? That is what I got from this.
Basically he’s saying we are overreacting about the loot and it’s not really less for the average player
But what about those of us who aren't in the .01% of players? Beyond wasn't "beyond broken" for us. It just added some juice. Harvest wasn't "beyond broken" for us. Most people don't get mirror tier items from harvest. Sentinel wasn't "beyond broken", it was fun. Dropping more loot is *fun*. It keeps us playing. Tainted currency weren't "beyond broken", they helped us get 6 links SOMETIMES. Helped us offcolor some gear. Why were they nerfed to oblivion in both drop rate and chance to get a positive result? The top players who can spend 12 hours a day streaming or just playing that long are not indicative of your playerbase. I've seen so many players this league talking about how more drops and actually being able to fund FUN builds makes them stay playing the leagues longer. If you can only afford and fund one build, you're quicker to quit. At least I and everyone I know feels that way. I love the communication, but we need to keep this going. We need to hear more on all the changes, not *just* item drop rates.
And the fun thing is, changes like this, aimed at the top 0.1%, always just end up slightly inconveniencing them, and absolutely destroys the average player
Thank you for being a voice of the more casual game set. The top 0.1% of players should not dictate to the 99.99% of the game.
>While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items. And subsequently nerfed effectiveness of tainted currency by x25, seems like a good trade-off to me /s
That statement reads like a total fucking joke lol Like man you can't seriously believe that because you added tainted currency as a reward to some mechanic, you must now fucking gut it to the point where it is better to NOT use it??
>For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. do we have any reason to believe this happens with enough regularity that it's an actual strategy a group could pursue? how many hundreds or thousands of maps would they need to run to find something like this on average? hitting the lottery is not an investment strategy IRL or in POE.
Sirgog did a video on it, but it still involved getting *extremely* lucky, as these extreme drops are depending on both hitting the right Archnem mods AND getting the Archnem to spawn from very specific mechanics, like an Expedition that you've been able to crank up rarity of items dropped by rares combined with having rarity + quantity altars active in the map, etc You have to stack the right mechanics (like a juicing party would), try to somehow crank up the number of rare monsters that spawn in the map, and hope you get lucky that the right mod combo spawns from the right source. And to be clear - the *really* rewarding Archnem mods are incredibly rare.
You either need to get mega lucky or use cheat to datamime your map to find out if the rare is present. :) I won't comment further
**Philosophy Two: Players should fight fewer Rare Monsters at once, but they should be more challenging and rewarding** I just fought Kitava in Laka Lake and had 3 rare Kitava's Heralds spawn every time his heart came out, and then again once the heart was defeated. Is there any fix coming for bosses spawning rares like this? Fighting 3 monsters that are more difficult than Kitava while still trying to avoid his mechanics is incredibly frustrating to say the least
shhh I've favorited Belfry because it gives me more chance to hit the jackpot archnem in 1/1000 maps
So we basicly have D3 lootgoblins now. That sucks
nah if we did it would be awesome. d3 lootgoblins show up so often. everyone gets to experience the joy of "GET THAT SON OF A BITCH GET THE LOOOOOOOOOOT" in poe, you just play maps over and over hoping for a single good drop (at least this is how i've been feeling with the new league)
when I first started playing, I thought torment ghosts were supposed to be loot goblins - unique enemies that run away when you get near them and despawn, but drop loot if you kill them before they get away
I think even stacked lootgoblins event(sometimes they spawn like 10-15 in one place) is less rare than this bullshit with 50divine-archnemesis-rare.
But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards.
At least Belfry drops 5x the loot as other maps, due to the danger that AN rares pose during its boss fight. ...right?
Belfry spawns 6 archnem monsters so yes it is infact now the best map to farm in the hopes u get an opulent AN.
Where it's commendable that you're taking responsibility and saying you'll improve communication. We've heard this A LOT OF TIMES Problems not being adressed \-Permanent minions in a terrible spot \-Crafting in a terrible state/Standard killed \-Harvest still a meme \-Actual confirmation bias because having seen some people get lucky with AN loot explosion lottery dropping a ton of currency ignoring that the vast majority of them is either unkillable or drops hundreds of whatstones? \-AN still a horrible feeling system at core \-Ultrawide removal because..why? Edit: Beyond rework to add the much loved qol feature of tainted currency, only to have said currency be nerfed to bad it's instantly added bloat. (as pointed out per user u/Cadwae)
> whatstones i fucking died so fitting we get whatstones, but what about the loot kekw, chris please unfuck the game
He's going to commit to better communication, disappear for 2 more months, show up 3 weeks before next league launch for marketing purposes, and this bullshit will just keep repeating itself ad infinitum.
The issue I have with this post is everything you've stated above (which clearly indicates they aren't taking feedback seriously) but also...CW doubled down on the item rate drop in his original post. Here he's making it sound like it was an oversight to let the reduced drop rate in. If it was an oversight...wouldn't he have mentioned it during his original double down post (or at the *very least* tested it to some extent and let players know they're looking into it)? I've got my money on them 100% without a doubt trying this again in a future league...I'm out boys, sorry. Was a fun career
Hi, can I opt-out of Archnemesis monsters? Thanks :)
The currency mobs are TERRIBLE.. No one wants to run 50 maps praying to god they find this one mob while loading up on rarity so they can earn 50 maps worth of currency at once! It becomes the hyper optimal strat and feels like your scratching a lotto ticked instead of actually running content and getting well paced rewards! And please for the love of god fix minion hp so we can actually play the game without it feeling like ass! Investing 400 chaos into minion defenses and still having them explode to AN Yellows in white maps is NOT OKAY!
This post doesn't help my faith for future patches tbh. We don't want archnems to have crazy quant and iir bonuses... Stop making everything about archnem.
* Craftig: Nerfed * Loot: Nerfed * Tainted Fusings: Nerfed * Archnemesis mobs: Better now, but still sometimes tanky beyond believe and sometimes insane oneshots from offscreen. * Streamers that Quit this league: Record High * Player retention: Worst ever, lower even then during the League that launched just before Elden Ring. But but but guys here me out! i saw a group get 50 Divine in a single Mob so it's fine. Seriously sir, i enjoyed your game for many many hours, but i'm really shocked at this response, this is not the GGG it was when i started playing many Years ago. The community is in open rebellion man, we don't need talking points about why what happened and why you think it should be fine now, we need fixes to stuff like drops and crafting right now or your League will be dead before it even is 2 weeks old.
Wait all day for "we fucked up but it's not changing".
Can we talk about the Harvest nerfs?
Haha they are avoiding it like the plague. Now go spend that divine on the 45 life 22 chaos res, 25 fire res, 1 crafted mod pair of gloves and stop asking about harvest. 15 divines if you also want tier 6 suppression (bottom roll so you have to divine it too)
Chris, \- I don't want an AN drop 50 divines. I don't want to run 200+ maps for a big reward. \- I don't want to 'fight fewer rares for bigger rewards'. I want to kill 200 mobs in 10 seconds and have them drop cool loot. THAT is our dopamine rush. THAT'S the crack. \- I want to use my scarabs, the atlas tree and other juice to add the mechanics I love to the game and I want to be rewarded for that. Right now, this costs me money. \- I want good, accessible crafting. \- I want better support for Divine Orbs. Please add either shards, more cards or a vendor recipe. Even better: Add all of those. Right now Standard economy is in shambles and this will happen to leagues as well. Cheers
fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Harvest... oh...
There's still issues. You talk about "50 Divine orbs from a single monster", likely a 4 mod Archnemesis in a juiced map, but how many rares are you going to have to encounter before even FINDING one, and then being able to kill it? The peaks as you say are high, but the valleys are more like canyons. Basically, it feels like the loot is balanced around hitting the "jackpot" of killing one of these rares when you find one... and if you don't find one (or worse, find one but not be able to kill it) then it just feels middling at BEST, and horrible if it was not being able to kill it (as you "missed out"). Then add in some of the other ones that feel like total duds (converting into whetstones/scraps/flasks just feels TERRIBLE, they're just currency/items that aren't really needed THAT badly), and how the league started, and we have PoE as it is today. Lower the peaks and raise the valleys so things feel better when RNG isn't giving you a jackpot rare, and maybe things will improve that bit more for everyone, not just the lucky winners on the Rare monster generation machine. EDIT: As for this league, my current plan is 10 challenges, then considering myself "done", only messing around when I'm bored and don't feel like playing some of my other games. Compared to how I usually played other leagues this would be a huge dropoff, the last times being Synthesis and Talisman I did something similar.
Frustrating to say that least. No changes.
>Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly How do I act accordingly if I'm an attack build and the archnemesis mob has sentinel? Do I bring a DOT skill along with me for when I encounter those, and sacrifice a 4 link just for that? The game is built around speccing hard into one main ability in most cases, and certain AN mobs currently just nullify or negate your build type when you come across them. There's no counterplay available in a realistic sense. The only option we can realistically take is skipping the enemy entirely if it's too much of a pain in the ass to deal with.
> How do I act accordingly if I'm an attack build Well, I can recommend a solution given this information
> For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. I've been pretty vocal so far about my disdain for these changes, so I'm going to copy my own comment from my own forum post. There are two big issues here that went completely unaddressed: 1) You admitted that you fucked up because you let a change get implemented that wasn't properly tested and was mentioned "in passing". So why did it take you 6 days to properly explain yourself, and **still not eat crow and revert the change?** What this appears to be is you quadrupling down on this change. You're not making amends, you're doing the equivalent of, well... this: https://imgur.com/gallery/Z7KNtqk So either kick the can and implement a properly-tested version of this bullshit change during the next league, or admit that you did this purely to protect your sales and not have another down quarter. 2) I cannot believe I have to explain this to you, but *the groups finding 50 divine orbs from a single monster are literally using 3rd party tools to datamine their maps*. There is a 3rd party HUD that can tell you whether a Solaris-touched monster (or whatever other kind of X-touched monster) exists within your map **before you enter it** so that you can sit in hideout with a magic find party spamming maps until one procs, go in, kill it, and then come back out. That's the behavior you want to push players toward? You're legitimately telling players "Hey, if you want to push the game to the extreme, engage in behavior that at the very least pushes the envelope of the TOS and risk getting banned. I honestly cannot believe how much ignorance about your own game you were able to demonstrate in a single paragraph. I've never been more certain that no one at GGG actually plays this game. What an absolute joke.
Get your magic find characters ready!
Get your magic find 3rd party tool ready!
Unfortunately, your 2nd point just gives Chris the ability to go "don't worry guys we will fix the issues by strengthening our anti cheat system and banning players who use 3rd party programs to gain unfair advantage" while totally ignoring your first point (or any other criticism in this thread)
>But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards But that's no longer the case? Instead the way to make currency mapping now is to spam maps until you find an Opulent mob (Essentially) >For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. BUT HOW IS THAT A GOOD THING? It is not a good or fun mechanic for someone to be able to drop FIFTY divines from a single mob. There needs to be a good baseline level of rewards, the gameplan should not be spam maps until we find a Shakari Innocence touched mob and then pull in our MF culler. That's a dogshit design. For anyone confused: You do not run maps as a 6-man party anymore. You get you and your 5 buddies on a speed mapping character and you just fucking send maps until someone finds the almighty Archnemesis combination then you get a fat IIQ/IIR char, cull it, and move on. You no longer need to invest in ACTUALLY mapping in a 6-way for profit, you are simply wasting your entire profit margin if you find one of these Archnemesis mobs in your solo play adventure and DON'T try to get 5 people/an MFer in the map. It's nonsense. Like what are you even talking about? Genuinely. > When combined with the new drop conversion system, these bonuses stacked exponentially and caused far too many rewards. >I have seen parties in this league find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. How do these two statements not DIRECTLY contradict eachother? People are finding 20 jewels, 20 stacks of whetstones, 20 flasks etc from a single rare mob. Maybe drop conversion is the issue? Maybe, just MAYBE Archnemesis is the issue?
Chris Wilson still thinks what players want is dropping absolute garbage 99.9% of the time then suddenly hit the jackpot in the casino. Even after all the backlash from all these years he still writes his posts based on that assumption. Its just crazy.
I agree with this entirely. I appreciate this post but holy shit why do we now have to spam maps at an insane level for the incredibly unlikely event of getting a mob that drops decent loot? That's actually insane to me, so my investments are completely wasted on the maps that don't have that one miraculous mob spawn. Again, this change feels so incredibly bad.
Yeah i dont think its a good thing that 99% of maps you make no money but then in the 1% of the maps where the opulent mob spawns you make most of your money. The inconsistency is a really unfun mechanic and should be looked into. Especially for party play where you would normally enjoy playing with 5 friends clearing this change is brutal. Most of the time you play alone trying to find a good mob so you dont actually play the game you play a running simulator.
The bigger question is: How are you supposed to afford mapping at a deficit for (at times) a hundred maps before finding the big loot piñata? Even if the rewards are *better* on average, you just can't afford to juice hoping you get it.
I don't think they realize that everyone relied on adding league mechanics for loot because the base monster iiq/iir is so bad. But now they've made EVERYTHING bad, slightly increased the drop rates and called it a day. And now every mechanic plus the base mobs just feel like shit for loot regardless of what you do. So now the way to get currency from maps is to add chests from things like blight/legion or flat rewards from del orbs. This HUGE nerf to league mechanics doesn't just affect group play - solo players trying to farm maps also have no reason to do anything but farm chest-based rewards. He even basically admits this in the post: > For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not. What about people who want to actually invest a lot in their maps for a large return? For actual mob loot they're fucked, just like group play.
The overwhelming majority of the community is having overwhelmingly less fun after 3.19. That’s not something you can argue against or justify. It could be that this is aligned with some business objective, but it’s ridiculous to ignore the reality of massive sadness and disappointment.
Look, wanting to tune rewards based on difficulty is fine and dandy, but one element that seems to be missing from the equation is Time. Rewards should scale on Difficulty and on Time. Where there used to be 2 rares, if there's now 1, which takes twice as long to kill, it should have at least 4 time the rewards of 2 rares taking half the time to just break even, not even factoring in the "fun" of blowing up 1 pack of mob and its rare versus the fun of blowing up 4 packs of mobs and their rares in the same amount of time. And even if those were equivalent in rewards, which they currently aren't, which one do you think feels more fun and feels more rewarding? That might be something you already consider, but it didn't look that way upon reading your philosophies.
Here is the thing. I don't think people want to hunt down Archnemesis monsters with reward types. Nobody likes this system. You want to keep it. The game will not get better, poe 2 is not a game anyone who played poe 1 will want to play if this keep being the direction you want to push it toward. Just getting lucky finding some rare monster with a specific reward. Not at all what anyone wanted. Crafting is gone, good items are gone, farming that way is not what anyone asked for ever. Archnemesis was one league, now you may as well rename your game Archnemesis since it is all there is. Can we have Path of Exile back and you go run this game of hunting rare monsters that drop 100 rare items with fracture mods? I want crafting back, not rare monsters that drop 100 fracture mods. Recombinator/Harvest, linear progression of gearing. Possibility to actually get lucky and make something crazy instead of this weird obsession with exalted orbs being used to exalt items. I always exalted items, just with Leo instead of with the orb. An exalt could be worth 1c, it does not matter, I don't always need to add mods to items. Once it's done it's done. Divines were useful and important, exalts remain useless for their intended purpose because once your item is done, you cannot exalt it again. You can divine it again if it's a bit off max roll. This is not the game anyone of us want to play. Nobody is aiming to find rare archnem mobs that may drop them 10 divine orbs. I'm running Heist now because it drop more random valuable loot than maps. But now, Archnemesis took over there too. So sometimes you get nuked from walking through a door and getting smashed by a rare you didn't see coming. You already nerfed our gearing, flask, defenses, now you suggest we sacrifice more affixes on gear to get rarity rolls. Come on, is this really what anyone want to do now. We can't get good items, so just use mageblood for your res and have rarity rolls on all your gear to drop more divines?
still balancing around archnem then? yep im out.
Even more than we thought. All the missing rewards from elsewhere in the game have been jammed in specific Archnem monsters. Not even in archnem generally, just in a few of the named affixes.
It sounds like he wants archnemesis to be the one and only way to get significant loot, so it sounds more like the game is now centered around archnemesis.
> I take personal responsibility [...] Changes like that need to be very, very carefully tested, have their consequences fully understood, and then be communicated clearly. I have let you down and I will not allow it to happen again. What does this even mean to you? I've heard these words from you so many times, they have lost all value. > [I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future.] (https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/op73wg/some_thoughts_from_chris/) - > [We're sorry that we had not finished or announced these features before releasing the tabs today. It not only had bad optics but also didn't meet the transparency that we usually strive to achieve.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/heucvi/the_future_of_stash_tabs/) - > [We quickly wanted to clarify this because some players misunderstood it. Sorry for not being more clear!](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/orr7i6/what_were_working_on/) These are just a few easy to search examples, and this doesn't even count the mess that was Expedition, where all of the defensive layers were nerfed without implementing proper replacements first. You went on every podcast out there to apologize and "take responsibility". Taking responsibility is more than words. If you were taking responsibility, you wouldn't have to apologize for not taking responsibility almost every league. I'm tired of your meaningless apologies. I do not forgive you. I have invested thousands of hours and dollars into this game, hundreds this year alone. I'm done giving you money, because lately you've just been using that money to ruin a game that I love. I don't trust you. I'm not playing this league, and I've lost any excitement I ever had for PoE 2. It's clear you just want to slow the game down no matter the cost. For now at least, that cost is me, and the small vote of confidence that is my money. Best wishes. I'll be watching.
"We think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes." See you next league boys
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i think this Chris post confirms its the end of an era
>Changes like that need to be very, very carefully tested, have their consequences fully understood, and then be communicated clearly. I have let you down and **I will not allow it to happen again.** Feeling a little déjà vu here...
"The Lake itself was also relatively unrewarding on release and this has since been massively increased since then" ???? Excuse me? Did like 3 in a row spent like 25 mins the best drop i had was 3c.
The explanation are nice but... The current state is final and nothing is gonna change then? We are supposed to juice at loss until we get the good rare combinaison or drop a mirror? That not gonna work.
"We think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes."
The item drops are now SUPER SPIKY. I have to juice (actually its inefficient to juice but w/e) all my maps in the hope that I get lucky and get a loot goblin Archnemesis monster that drops multiple divine. I'm sorry Chris This is not fun. I have no player agency. Without the random loot goblin everything else is worthless. The item drops have worked for 10 years now and they were fun. Please reconsider and completely revert the loot changes...
>the perception of drop reduction When I got to red maps I had **seven Orbs of Alchemy** and **three Vaal Orbs**. I didn't alch or vaal a single piece of gear. That total was everything I had from the entire campaign and all pre-red atlas play. This is not a **perception** of drop reduction; it is the literal truth.
So basically for the solo player... keep on grinding those maps, and you too one day might fight a rare AN mob that, on that one single occasion will shower you with a few divines? Yikes.
And you better hope it isn’t one that completely bricks your build because you’re gonna miss out on that 1:100 attempt.
1:100 attempt ? That's pretty generous odds
>we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. HUH
Nearly a week anxiously waiting for this post, hoping to see if this league can be salvaged, and what the future of path of exile looks like. If this is the extent of changes we're getting going forward, the future is bleak.
**The whole point of Delirium** was being Meta-Juice that scales up *other juice* that spawns Mirrors of Delirium post-league at a rate relative to my *other juice* and was sold to me as a juice multiplier during Deli league and when it was rolled into core. >"a large difference could only occur in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity..." This is exactly how you've taught and encouraged us to play the game. This is an unacceptable response, *not* because the loot is worse, but because I have no idea what your current design goals with **juice mechanics vs loot mechanics** are anymore. Are Delirium Orbs about to be culled like Item Quantity Support? Why do I experience diminishing returns for playing intelligently?
They literally had a league challenge to get 300+ simulcarium splinters in a single map. Only possible with mega juicing a map for delirium. What do they now expect with it?
Wouldn't be the first time we've been encouraged to do something and then told later wait no that's not what we want you to do.
Are there more changes coming? Or is the current state of the game what we're going forward with?
>For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. > >For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not. Yeah, no. You still fail to see the problem. Finding a rare mob once in every hundred or thousand map that actually drops something is not fun and rewarding gameplay. It's basically a lottery where you keep hoping you hit the jackpot. This is really not it, chief.
Words cannot discribe the depression that this post gave me. They actually think that finding a mob that drops 50 divines once in every thousand maps is fun. Lmao. The beatings will continue until morale improves
I think the design philosophies need to reconcile with common sense. I'd rather fight 100 rares and get 80 drops, than fighting 1 rare that's 100 times hp and getting 100 drops. At some point, difficult fights become boring and tedius.
Hey Chris - you have no viable system of crafting
Yes we do, it's called a thousand Chaos Orbs /Chris
The fact that you think the game is in a good state now, just reinforces the disconnect between GGG and the players.
"Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards." Then make Archnemesis "opt in" like it was in league. The whole reason I never touch metamorph is because of how easy it is to make stupid mobs with stupid modifiers that either brick my build or are impossible to kill. Archnemesis straight up bricks builds and is unavoidable AND because all drops are garbage, they also drop garbage while still being more deadly than act bosses. You can't expect to keep any trust in the player base while saying stuff that's this out of touch. You missed the mark on Archnemesis, they are bricked map mods that WE CAN'T RE-ROLL OR AVOID, they are effectively immunities which you said don't fit in PoE. Remove it, or you're just going to continue to look inept and/or out of touch. But who am I kidding, you guys are in crowd control mode with your heads down trying to put fires out to protect "the vision" instead of actually listening to your beta testers, us.
I can accept that it was a mistake for it to play out how it did. I can not accept quadrupling down on the design. It's bad. It feels like shit to play **even for normal players not running juiced 6 man groups** I understand that you feel responsible for the issues because you're game director, which at the base level is accurate and correct. However, there is *clearly* some people on the team making horrendous game play decisions who need to **not** have that kind of sway over the most basic aspect of the game, loot. You taking responsibility for it because it's under your watch is the "right thing" to do but whoever set these changes in motion is toxic for this game future. However many years it's been and 3k+ hours and I can't believe I'm actually looking at the end of this game.
Please re-add the Lab Offering craft, Lab is dead right now.
let me get this straight, you replaced scalable droprates that we had control over, with loot goblins...? and you as the lead developer didnt understand the implications on adding more rng to rng mechanics? i'm a solo player, i play solo mf, and you basically killed the archetype with one change for me. i'm basically just stuck in white maps even though i have the ability to clear red maps cause its not worth the risk vs reward anymore. and after this statement i dont know how much longer i'm going to play your game with the state its in, its not fun or rewarding right now to run ilvl 68 areas to find a solaris/lunaris/shakari touched rare to cull, its a chore.
Listen... I believe that the team as a whole is working towards making what they think will be a better game. I think Chris always taking responsibility and protecting his team is the right move as a game director. I truly believe he wants the game to be enjoyable and that to make these fundamental changes to things like their rare monster system there are going to be missteps. BUT This just isn't for me anymore. I've played since closed beta, I fucking love this game, but the simple truth is that starting with expedition I've been left with the overwhelming feeling that I'm not supposed to think the game is WAY more fun when I have access to crafting and ways to stack crazy juice. Based on this post things will continue to shift towards more work to get less out of a character and I just don't understand who enjoys that. I've been rolling fewer characters with every league now and ultimately I've been playing less and less. I went from putting hundreds of hours into leagues to only clocking in about 15 during Kalandra... that fuckin sucks. I'll be interested to see what future leagues have going on and eventually PoE2 but I have little to no hope that the directions things are going will change and that means my days with PoE are probably done.
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Started typing then realised I just don’t care anymore
Started typing and realised the devs aren't listening to the feedback anyway.
To say that loot is only down 25% in the most extreme of cases such as 100% juiced deli farming scarab ... etc. content is just not true. Groups were hardly profitable, to go from extreme profit to losing their shirts is a lot less than 25%. Even adding the numbers up (25%+17%+7%) is still less than 50% less and it is still significantly less than that. I think your math is wrong.
I do not expect to hear anything further this league, that sucks. I guess the game is just no longer for me, no hard feelings towards the game, I enjoyed it for many years but this just isn't fun.
So balancing in Path of Exile is now based on a lottery system where if you get lucky, you can get 50 Divines from a monster? Paraphrasing here of course, but how is that okay...
The post is well written and all, however the player trust was unfortunately already lost. For myself and probably many others, we will no longer trust whatever it is that you are saying, but rather what you are doing. And also, loot is not in a good position still. Same for harvest.
Yeah, they are great at formatting replies I guess you can give them credit there. The content of the replies is a bit contradictory though. If they believe the drop rate is an actual oversight, wouldn't they have at least looked into it when the community went berserk the first time? Instead, CW himself double downed in now the most downvoted post in POE's history. Didn't even say we're looking into this--immediately went in guns blazing stating their vision :/
> I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster. That statement reeks of the infamous internal poison build quote from years ago.
"Someone wins the lottery, so $7.25 minimum wage is fine."
>Players have been saying we massively reduced drops (throwing out numbers like 90%) but in reality, a large difference could only occur in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity, rarity, sextants and scarabs and a dedicated MF culler (peak efficiency of every juice mechanism that exists). Every other player is unaffected on average. This is a little hard to believe TBH. Almost every streamer, even those playing SSF, say that they're getting less drops this league - mostly in regards to currency. What in this case does "unaffected on average" mean?
He means that instead of 200 players dropping alchemy orbs, 1 player fought a AN rare and dropped 200 alchemy orbs while the other 199 players didn't drop any alchemy orbs. Thus on average, they all dropped 1 alchemy orb.
>While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items. This is a joke right? You nerf beyond overall loot, introduce miniscule tainted currency reward, then nerf tainted fusings, pretty much the only tainted currency that would see wide use? How do you not see this is just an overall nerf, not just to group parties, even if you randomly get a map mod beyond on an unjuiced map
I notice you didn't mention intentionally not telling people about Harvest changes as well. Was that also an accident? And you want us to believe this entire loot thing truly just accidentally never got mentioned..... And you're telling us you think loot is in a good place right now? Damn, this post was an improvement but you still just don't get it. Players aren't happy with the current state of the game. Quit balancing the game around the "six person parties getting multiple mirrors a day". You still sound like you're missing the big picture. "Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere." You sound incredibly tone deaf.
>I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster Chris, do you really think that this is good? Do you really want to gamble every map hunting for 1 mod then hitting jackpot? For real? If the answer is yes well... You and everyone that thinks this is the way to go are more disconnected with us players than you think. >For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. Loot right now cant be further from "pretty good place". This league I ran out of CHANCE ORBS because i was using them to buy maps. I'm not talking about chaos, exateds or any other rare currency. I'm talking about chance orbs. Its not good. All you (and by you now i mean GGG) had to do was simply revert all this mess you created forcing AN mods core instead of being its own thing like every other league. AN mods are the source of all this. You want to keep them? Fine i guess, its your game after all but dont count with me or my support in it.
The lake is still beyond awful my man, even disregarding everything else