From E-mail to GGG: List of Things the game Really Needs!

Hi, there.

I've sent tons of feedback over the years, been playing PoE ever since open beta. Even though it has improved a lot overall since then, it's still a long way off of what it should be, IMHO.

Some of the things I'll suggest here are also dozens of other players' suggestions which can also be found in the official forums.


In random order of importance: ( I won't talk about the graphics engine / game performance / end game maps )


1 - Let us use an alternate way of leveling new characters after we finish the main campaign 1 time. I've grown tired of playing the main campaign for like 1000000 times, honestly! Besides, almost nobody plays the 2nd half of act 4 in Merciless, they do the mines quest to get the skill point and that's it. If completing it, though enables you to choose not to play the whole thing again and again, it would be completed by most people. This is much more motivational than some achievement...

A way to level your chars would be to play maps from Level 1. That would solve another problem, the hideout / masters problems partly.

Give everybody a default hideout as soon as they reach Lioneye's ( could give it as a reward let's say for killing Hillock so it fits with the rest of the game ) with ZANA as the main Master. Then have Zana give you Infinite Missions till you reach Level 68-70 and adjust her xp gains accordingly. After that you could have turn her back to normal XP / DAILY missions. ***Mind you, the main campaign AREAS SHOULD ALREADY BE AVAILABLE, so if we opt to go to dried lake for example at level 60-65, we could do that.

Every time you make a new char, Zana would offer the same OPTION again. ***Keep in mind, it has often taken me more than 20 maps to find zana in a map so I'll be able to invite her to my hideout, which is super frustrating to say the least.

2 - The game has WAY TOO MANY DISTRACTIONS now. WAY TOO MANY. You want to play 1 map / farm 1 area and you have to stop every minute to do certain stuff. It totally kills the enjoyment of leveling / killing monsters.

Boxes are OK, everybody loves em and they are fast 99% of the time.

Then you have...:

- Talismans...( bah.. )
- Corrupted areas
- Masters that send you back and forth the map / area


AND if you meet Zana, you might as well DOUBLE all those distractions.

++ Labyrinth soon? :p

My suggestion: JUST LEAVE BOXES in those areas, remove the rest from maps areas and give access to them in a separate way. For example corrupted areas are also accessed through the commonly dropped "HER MASK" card now. You could make that card EVEN MORE COMMON if you wish to give people the same % of access they had before removing corr areas from maps. You could do the same with Talismans, have a TALISMAN CIRCLE card / fragment drop that can be used in Zana's Map Device and will load an area specifically for using talismans.



3 - The Merciless XP Penalty in High Levels 80++ is simply frustrating as hell. It serves no purpose whatsoever, since the game is still plagued by desync and / or super hard content at time. Whirling blades / cyclone and other fast skills cause desync very very often, even with low ping. I have 65-75 ms ping and I get often desyncs when using these skills. (and they are must have skills... )


PoE endgame as it is currently, it is unfinished, since the maps don't scale as high as your character. Which means RE-ROLLING is a vital part of the game. However, the reason many people including myself play PoE is because of its unique complexity and the ability to create uncommon builds ( I've created many myself, including a 3link build utilizing a unique item that can easily reach 95+ ). ENCOURAGE THEORYCRAFTERS in other words :)

Suggestion 1: Either remove that penalty after level 85 OR make it scale till it is eventually removed like (Level 86 = 10% penalty, 86% = 9% penalty and so on till it reaches ZERO penalty at level 95%) so you will encourage players to reach higher levels and experiment more with certain characters and wacky builds that require more points to be viable in end game.


Suggestion 2: In the new Temp Leagues introduce a 3rd type of league that doesn't include the XP Penalty and see if it is more popular than the league which has it. This way you can later on decide having tangible evidence.

4 - Master of Disaster. Masters, masters, masters! One of the most useful and at the same time most boring features in PoE!

a) Many missions can't be done with certain builds, esp Vorici's which leads to unecessary frustration, again.
b) They take waaaay too long to level and as I said, they are constant distractions in maps.
c) Some of their discounts are simply silly. Nothing is comparable to market prices unless the Alts-Jews-Fuses discounts.

Suggestion: Include a Hall of Masters area, accessible from our hideouts in which ALL Masters are going to be present BUT keep the Hideout levels / rules intact. That is, you can invite masters in your hideout when one of em reaches Level 2-3 etc. Their missions; instead of meeting them randomly in maps / areas, have them give you like 5-10 missions a day so people can choose which masters to level up and not rely on rotations / guilds etc. This way people who will play non-stop will still level them very quickly using their rotations BUT other people will not be so far behind and won't be taken advantage like now.

People offer Master level 8 services, your know at what cost? A recent example; a guy had this thread in the official forums, he offered Vorici Level 8 service for 35 chaos o.O + you provide him with the materials.

Seriously????????? Why would you let people knowingly take advantage of the players all the time just because they take advantage of game mechanics / are parts of big guilds ???


P.S. After a little search I was lucky enough to find this amazing guy who did it FOR FREE. I just gave him some currency coz I felt like thanking him, but he repeatedly asked for NOTHING.


5 - Concerning Respecs: As people have said many times, have the Bandit Choices highlighted somewhere AND offer us easy access and respecing / choosing sth else ( maybe straight from the tree? )


6 - Tons of item bases are just vendor trash. Why???


7 - FURTHER ENHANCE THE VENDORS: Make it so we can easily exchange currency using the vendors, esp when 90% of the time 2 fuses : 1 chaos. Give us more quick currency conversions, nobody wants to waste their time looking for people to help him convert currency.


8 - Add more sounds to loot filters. If I'm not mistaken there are only ~10 right now. We need more!


9 - Reconsider the use / drop rates of many cards. At the moment only a few are worth farming.

10 - Reconsider the crazy mana costs / buffs in comparison to how easy it is to get super fast attack / cast speeds.


*** EDIT*** 11 - Make the area portals last much longer, as quite often when you level up and someone calls you / you try to gain a level before you hit a hard boss results in losing your progress. It is extremely frustrating in certain cases.


***EDIT*** 12 - Make the Temp Leagues last for an even shorter time, many people quit after 1,5 months or so.


*** EDIT *** 13 - Auto-sort inventory / stash button!!!


*** EDIT *** 14 - Add some visual indication on certain mobs such as bearers. Ideally u should add indicators on Uniques / Exiles, too as they often hide inside packs of trash and they can 1-shot you...


I'm sure, there's a lot more I forgot to mention but that should be enough for now. I hope my suggestions will help further improve the game.

i think that ggg's stance on "the player's decisions have to matter" answers most of your points.

also their practice to provide "sideway expansions" instead of whole new acts every year which enables them to have more frequent content updates is intentional.

for your "alternative leveling" suggestion: i think they will answer to that soon as many players brought it up.

P.S. I added # 11.




Well, they have partly listened to our suggestions throughout the years.

For instance, I was one of the people that e-mailed them about putting a portal at the end of corrupted areas so we don't have to backtrack and waste our time. It was a step forward even if not revolutionary.


We'll see.

# 13 added.

1: hell yes, would make HC much more enjoyable
2: no
3: NO
4: buff mission difficulty and xp
5: no
6: dunno
7: no
8: don't care
9: yes
10: huh?
11: without knowing the additional server load -> maybe
12: no
13: yeah, Titan Quest did that one right

# 14 added.

lol just lol