Dedicated player since early 2012. Skipped Prophecy. I want to come back, but I'm wavering.

I'm at a crossroads.

I love PoE.

Regardless of things I like or dislike about PoE, it's everything I'd always hoped for in an ARPG. From developers on down to the player, from a technical and inventive standpoint, from free to shining free, things "PoE" are far better than any ARPG game out there.

I skipped prophecy because of:
1. Labyrinth.
2. Went all-out Izaro.

I'm a hardcore player, and mostly solo.
I'm not a no-lifer, but far from casual: Somewhere in the middle.
I know how to play PoE, and play it well.

Here's the crossroads: I want to dive back in, yet I'm absolutely 100% turned off by the Labyrinth.

I could write a wall of text explaining why. I could argue both sides of the 'labyrinth' argument easily, and be compelling on each side.

However, that doesn't change the fact that the Labyrinth utterly goes against my 'fun' gauge, and kicks off the new "Why am I wasting time with PoE" thought. That thought never once entered my mind until the Labyrinth was introduced, and now it's the thought that dominates my willingness to dive into Atlas.

Which brings me to this post, and the following comments and questions:
1. Many people feel as I do. Thousands of posts over many months.
Has there been any significant changes to the Lab that:
a} removes gated character progression?
b} allows *most* builds to get past all difficulties of the lab?
c} provides an alternate way for the ping-concerned or frogger-unskilled to get carried/progressed?

And most importantly:

2. Is the lab being doubled down on with atlas maps?

Thanks for reading, and thanks again if you take the time to answer.

"Dedicated"?

Don't think we need a new classification of player. We're already confused enough about "casual". Don't get us started on "dedicated".

Ahhh! :) Then some clarification on what "dedicated" in my sense means:

I am dedicated to and appreciative of PoE regardless of things I like or dislike about it, and have put enough time in to give honest consideration and critique to what I feel adds or detracts from the game.

Whether I choose to continue playing or stop forever, I'll continue to praise PoE as the best example for future games development to follow.

Hope that helps a bit!

You should probably just find a different game. Lab isn't going anywhere. I don't get why people are so stuck on this minor part of the game. If you play poe like 10 hours a week, and a league is 12 weeks, thats 120 hours of poe. You can complete the trials and the lab in probably 2 hours (faster if you pay for it) but let us make it an even 5 hours just for the sake of argument. Thats 5% of the total time, or in other words, 95% of your time (again if you only played 120 hours during the whole league) would not be lab related. This figure goes down drastically if you play more than this, I would imagine for most players 99% of their time is played outside of the lab.

tldr: quit

We have no information yet on what changes to the lab, if any, they are planning for Atlas. So no one can really answer your questions.

But if you are that dedicated like you mentioned, you would do the trial and lab once, and then move on and not let it stop you from playing a game you like because there was an hour in there that you didn't like.

"

Psomm wrote:

Has there been any significant changes to the Lab that:
a} removes gated character progression?
b} allows *most* builds to get past all difficulties of the lab?
c} provides an alternate way for the ping-concerned or frogger-unskilled to get carried/progressed?

2. Is the lab being doubled down on with atlas maps?

a) No changes to gating ascendancy points behind the lab, and no indication that there will any changes to this in AoW (and it's more or less certain there won't be).

b) Some changes to help energy shield characters with traps, and more information about how to manage the lab with different builds, but otherwise no changes.

c) No changes.

2. There was a video showing an atlas map run with levers that opened locked doors, but nothing I've seen suggests there will be any traps in the maps.

Play softcore for a league is my advice but the lab is still going to make you rage because of having to restart it if your net is bad. You can also play softcore as if it was hardcore and just delete or stop playing the character when it dies to a legit reason.

This is kinda the advice I give to the people I run into who want to play hardcore but have bad net.

It's also what I do most of the time when I don't know for sure if my net is going to be great or not.

Tons of people have made posts about there distaste for the labyrinth. (Including myself) There is a 260 something page thread on that as well. Plenty of people are upset about it. But at this point, everyone knows... GGG knows about it. I don't think their focus in Atlas will be to change up the lab. I wouldn't be surprised to see anything in the patch notes relating to the lab itself unless it's a bug fix or something.

I could see them maybe removing the ascendancies from it in the future... but that's a long stretch. It is what it is at this point. The best thing you can do is get to run through them once, and never look back. I kind of believe that GGG want to sweep this one under the rug and move on.

It seems to me that you are activly trying to find a reason to NOT play PoE. The merits of the reasons you are looking for are erelavent since it only matters to you ( lab good or bad dose not matter in your case no need to get drawn into a argument about it )

So the answer is simple , if your not excited to play again , don't .

Thanks ShaUrley, appreciate the info.

For a few others: This should be obvious by now. It's not about how much time is spent in the lab. It's about the 100 HC hours invested outside the lab, then 2 seconds a lag spike or frogger-non-hop nulls and voids those 100 hours.