An overview of Abyss league.

BEFORE MAKING COMMENTS. PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE POST, IT'S LONG, I KNOW.

I'm at the point where I simply feel lost in this games design and clear expression of how it cannot handle balancing and creation of original challenging content. Their is an absolute difference between what is intelligent and creative design, that allows for player learning and progression, versus what is simply an entirely RNG system, with very little in the way of "skill" being included in the designs.

The list of mechanics in this game that simply one shot you, regardless of health, energy shield, chaos resistance, elemental resistance, cast when damage taken mechanics, endurance charge mechanics, armour, block, eva. Absolutely none of these things matter. Life does not matter in the context of boss behavior or end game mapping.

The thing I fail to see is how balance between 'what is fair' and what is simply 'gauranteed deaths' is astounding. Roll even one bad mod on a map and you're asking for the majority of everything past t-13 to one shot you.

I have cleared all content this league. Shaper, Atziri, Lab, Hogm, All t-15 maps, and optional t-16 maps, I have farmed vault to the eyeballs, it's astounding. This league I have absolutely no lifed to hell the entirety of what is path of exile and while I have enjoyed it, there are things that make absolutely no sense to me as a player whatsoever.

1) One shot mechanics are both A) A lazy way of creating difficulty. B) Frustrating and often mind boggling to understand as certain things can happen, i.e. you either instantly die, you're caught by a mob with a billion mods that crits you and RNGjesus says today you're unlucky, the floor explodes, the corpses around you explode, a monster casts on death, etc etc etc etc etc etc............ the game is quite literally endlessly filled with things that are supposed to "keep you on edge" when in reality just develop frustration and more often than not cause players to uninstall and leave PoE completely for long or indefinite periods of time. This is both costly to GGG and the community as a whole.

2) The end game is far, far, far too grindy. The mechanics of chasing the elder/shaper round the map are some of the most monotonous and boring experiences I've had in path of exile in a long time. They quickly become repetitive and offer little in the way of challenge or inspiring design. The end game needs something more concrete and progressive, which offers players chances of better and more solid rewards. I would suggest the addition of multifloored and increasingly difficult dungeons with their own bosses and experiences with perhaps greater rewards for higher tiers of play. The idea of being effectively "forced" to play the game a certain way is both baffling and incredibly frustrating. Why do I want to run lower tier maps, ever. If you're developed enough to run these maps then those are the maps I want to be running constantly, yet the Atlas and map drop system is counter intuitive to what the game suggests is the correct route. You have two constrasting ideas that have more negative impact than positive.

3) The drop rates of mostly everything in the game are completely beyond abyssmal. Don't get me wrong, I've had my share of lucky nights, I found 15 abandoned wealth cards in one night farming vault. Then for a whole week found absolutely nothing of note worthy or any kind of drop value. The map drop rate this league is also insanely low, a system that is both completely ambigious and difficult to understand, that becomes one of the longest grinds ever, which in my opinion is a very long winded way of dragging out content. I feel the game needs to meet players half way and offer more in the ways of better drops, more maps and more opportunities to earn bigger and better rewards. Perhaps offering exclusive items from specific dungeon chains, (Similar in design to the roguelike dungeons of Grim Dawn for example) e.g. if you clear this dungeon chain, you might gain a fragment, similar to prophecy chains which allows you to run unique bosses or unique encounters.

4) Certain aspects of the end game grinds this league are awful. I can't bare the idea of how many abysses I have to run to get 50 liches. In 400 hours of game time this league I'm still sat at 13/50. I do every abyss I see, I have not missed a single abyss in playtime this league. Why is the spawn rate of these experiences so low? Again tryinng to drag out the value of economy. On top of this you add a challenge to identify a two abyssal socket unique, something most people are selling for 8 ex to identify. This not only creates an inflated solution to getting the achievement, it locks the achievement behind LUCK, e.g. a noob that's been playing for 10 minutes finds an abyss, coincidentally gets a lich kill and is rewarded with a shroud of the lightless 2 socket, whereas someone who has invested 400-500 hours will find NOTHING. This makes NO sense. Players should be rewarded for time spent, which more often that not is the opposite case.

5) Not being able to kill bosses due to "sequencing" it's a completely nuts mechanic.... and more often than not results in the player being put in positions of gauranteed deaths. This also removes the incentive to stack health at any point, especially in softcore because simply, it doesn't matter how much health you have, the game will still one shot you anyway, unless you're prepared to invest in dodge/eva/block/ which simply lowers this likely hood of this happening, instead of doing anything about it at all. Their is simply put, no way of mitigating any of the harsher effects of the game, mix this with d-sync, ping, acts of god.

6) There is absolutely no incentive to play as a multiplayer experience, even though the game is clearly advertised as multiplayer and directly encourages that. Adding other players to the map makes things both A) Harder and mostly artificially harder. Bosses suddenly having double health makes little to absolutely no sense. B) You basically get the same drops anyway, aside from the person who opened the map who reaps ALL the consistent profits of maps being opened anyway. Even the games economy pushes and isolates players to a single player experience, their is little if any point in the multiplayer system unless it's in regards to trading. This is displayed brilliantly in the efforts of players who provide services for bosses, with rules that state you must be outside of the map until the last second to get the point.

8) Some/Most bosses past act 4 are completely out of contrast with anything the earlier game offers. This is clear from the amount of characters providing Kitava/Malachi services in HC. And also displayed brilliantly in the forever generating "level zones" for characters like Lake, Blood, Aqueduct etc. The amount of players in my guild alone asking for help with most of these bosses is silly and shows clearly the progression steps of the game and how they are out of touch with the general player base. It leaves me to ask whether the development team is playing their own game, as a player pointing out these experiences and finding people agreeing with him, I find is shocking the development team aren't pointing out the same issues.

9) The constrasts between ranged characters and melee characters is too harsh and difficult to understand. I ran cyclone as a league starter and dropped shaper in the second week, it was beautiful experience, yet still included far more frustration that required. After this I switched to Tornado shot/Barrage. After a week of play, I asked myself this. Why was cyclone ever nerfed? It wasn't needed, ever. Ranged builds can avoid 75-80% of the problems in this game with little to no effort, they can AoE the entire screen without issues, clear maps at completely insane speeds yet remain powerful and obviously game breaking. Vaal pact didn't need nerfing, it needed moving. That's all. Nerfing Vaal pact not only damaged a huge population of builds, it basically destroyed and made completely non viable a huge pool of the currently used meta.

10)Chimera fight sequencing is amongst the most ridiculous in the game, when I talk about gauranteed deaths.... the smoke cloud phase is amongst the least fun, frustrating aspects of the guardian fights as a whole. I feel it's honestly one of the worst bosses in the entire game, their is literally no way of mitigating other than block/eva the damage chimera doles out, even with serious damage mitigation on your character. The design choice is clearly supposed to point out the contrasts between different builds and suggests that you should use a more tanky character yet, all the other guardians don't display this problem and have easily learnable and progressive fight systems. Yet the Chimera fight sits alone as one of the most talked about and annoying fights in the game. Little has changed or ever developed from these complaints and simply a lot of it feels brushed under the rug and forgotten about versus new content.

11) The map "drop" system is completely and utterly ambiguous and I fail to see why. Constantly I feel GGG seems to find it required that nerfing anything in regards to sustainable income from the game, even with 57% bonus on the Atlas, it mostly feel's worthless. To play for days without finding even guardian map drops to then get a few that sputter on the ground at once is more than demoralising and does nothing but create a negative picture of the end game experience. Players should be rewarded for mapping, they should be able to sustain maps. I've heard nothing but complaints off guild members about this throughout the entire league.

12) Running 10 full sets of shaper fragments. 6-8 hours of work. to recieve nothing. Is both demoralising and frustrating. This does absolutely nothing other than create false economy around insanely lottery like mechanics. PEOPLE NEED to feel REWARDED for things they are doing. This is roughly 7-10 exalted I could have just sold. Which is what the majority of players do because simply, it's barely worth running this content unless you're prepared to run possibly 300-400 maps. WHERE is the room for a "casual" player base. You're eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of players who could be playing the game and supporting development.

13) Economy/Currency system is progressive based on the length of leagues. This has both an impact on drop rates and the frequency of those drop rates. Shorter leagues should be released that have improved drop rates, even if this is only a beta test idea, I think it would be interesting to make happen. More work needs to be done on creating value through exclusivity e.g. Shaped/Elder items are an amazing addition to the game because they create new and powerful ways of approaching things. If shorter leagues aren't a posibility, then some kind of item sink needs to be developed. E.G. Better recipe systems for the billions of unique items generated that aren't worth anything. We need more ways of making what is worthless, valued. Thing's like Vaal orbs, perhaps a more complex or useful vendor recipe or another kind of item sink is essential in maintaining overal drop value and player feedback in terms of reward.

14) Crafters/Menus for crafters feel dated and cumbersome, I feel a much more UI friendly and tuned menu for crafters is needed, I also feel a larger variety of tasks given by crafters is required in order to mix up gameplay and create a more fun progression curve to the crafter experience. So many ways of improving their leveling speed are a hidden enigma to most players e.g. they wouldn't think of using prophecies, ./global 820 etc. I would like to see a grid based crafting system that has all the available crafting options displayed fully and clearly in front of you, this removes player down time and how much time is spent in their hideout. Having to scroll up and down a page of mods to recraft the same one over and over feels both dated and cumbersome. We need a more ergonomic and tailored design choice for the UI layout of crafters. I also feel the crafting/quest system for leveling crafters needs an overhaul, there again needs to be more variety and a larger way of earning crafter experience. How about players earning experience FOR crafting? Doesn't that make sense? That the more I do something the more I am rewarded for it? How about the more you craft, the more SPECIFIC you can make the item you're crafting? This allows SSF players and SC players to have more obtainable items for the work they are doing and also doesn't hurt the economy as it's constantly generating higher value sinks for the orb systems based around it.

15) The challenges in this league are locked behind RNG mechanics. This is completely counter intuitive to what I think of in the word "challenge". Challenge implies something that is difficult but also achieveable. Getting 50 Lich kills has proven in nearly 2 months of solid play to be something that is both out reach for even above average players so much as being out of reach the majority of the player base. This is backwards and needs changing in future leagues.

16) The guild system needs to become a guild system, instead of an alternative to global chat. Right now, the guild system is a small meeting point for players to find a level of social sanity, there needs to be an active guild system, with guild crafters, that as a collective people can work toward as a collective, this creates both incentive to play and also creates reason/purpose for people to work as a collective. I also feel this would encourage people to stay on longer in the league, instead of playing for a few weeks. How about theirs a guild crafter that we can ALL level up, EVERYONE can see him, use him and do his/her quests and we are ALL rewarded for the contributions we've made. Perhaps every week players can collect a reward//point/s that allows them to buy league specific decorations for highouts etc?

17) Crafters and hideouts need MORE Customization/Building mechanics!!! Why is their no lock to function? I can spend 10 minutes trying to get the angle of a specific object right instead of being able to lock it to 90* and set it to a square grid. Why do some highouts feel much smaller than others? Why am I not able to create rooms, extentions, perhaps hideouts could have even more levels to work past than just the three we have right now? Again this could be something that players can work toward.

18) Crafting items in general is painful, more often than not you're left with much less than you put in, unless you have hundreds upon hundreds of orbs and even then, you can spend 3000 chaos and absolutely nothing happens. Even with high ilvl items. Crafters barely change this because they offer so little in the way of control, the same thing can be said for essence crafting, they allow you to control ONE result, this still doesn't mean the other 5 aren't going to be complete garbage. This is completely counter intuitive and I strongly beieve some sort of system needs to be introduced that makes crafting more and more specific based on player input and time given. Any kind of experience system for the actual CRAFTING component, e.g. everytime I roll on a specific item that item gains exp which over time results in more specific results that you actually want. This instantaeneously rewards players with high investment but still leaves the market closed and niche because only certain types of players will be doing it. Not to mention the fact most of the craft materials themselves take a monolithic amount of time to farm/achieve large amounts of. This is again both counter intuitive and more often than not frustrating for the majority of players. I also believe socketed and linked items need some sort of item 'trigger' that is inherently random to the item but will always happen at some point or another, e.g. when a 6 socket item is produced, the item is randomly assigned a trigger point, say 452 fuses for this random item, the player doesn't know that but at least they are gauranteed through investment for it to happen, the trigger then reset's when passed to another player and has a maximum random limit of that equivalent to vorici's 1500 fuse cost, this stops players spending THOUSANDS of orbs fusing items which also creates a huge and obviously negative sink in the players mind.

19) People are directly encouraged via game mechanics and the randomness of RNG to run ONE specific map over and over, sometimes two or 3 shaped maps. Yet the game encourages you that completing the Atlas is a positive thing where it's simply NOT at all a positive thing. The bonus is almost useless if guardian maps aren't dropping at a consistent rate. The nerfs to the current system do nothing but force players to run specific maps constantly e.g. Vault, shore, siege, coves, strand etc. There is almost nothing that creates an incentive for Atlas completion. The problems with running all the maps on the Atlas also stem from the absolute randomness that is RNG, there is no stable level of play where players can consistently gain experience, aside from running individual maps, essentially forcing a level of control over how the leveling works. The other obvious problems from this are people who will running poorjoys from 1-100. This makes no sense -_- the game should offer other ways of progressing that work with the premise that is intended by the developers. Right now there are FAR too many contrasting ideas that creates constant shelving problems and progress problems. This also becomes obvious by the state of progression in leagues.

20)The fragment tab - This should have been part of the map stash tab and only furthers my frustration with GGG as a whole. Your continual display of simple yet obvious cash grabs from the community not only expresses the lack of respect you show for us but nails it in the coffin further. -_- People have supported GGG with open arms, helped them grow to be a rather large company and it annoys me how companies seem to lose sight of what is actually important and instead follow the golden path of money and expansion. You're losing me and probably many others as customers and supporters. Please make this part of what I already paid $15 for. Fragments are MAPS. Whether you want to define them differently or not. When I use an offering to the goddess, I open a MAP. When I use Atziri fragments I open a MAP the same is said for EVERY fragment piece in the game. Where do you get the fragments from? MAPS what do I need to use to open the MAPS where I get these fragments from? OTHER MAPS. EVERYTHING IS RELATED TO MAPS IN EVERY WAY AND POSSIBLE FORM. WHY IS THIS NEEDED?! You should have just put a $25 dollar price tag on the map stash tab and left it as that! What's next.... man you've set the ball rolling with this havn't you, I guess you can say this is long term shortsight. You've created a monster in GGG itself and now it's hungry.

21) Trading needs to be improved and greatly expanded upon, e.g. Better anti-scamming measures, better guild stash logging measures for guild leaders, better trading screens for crafting master "services" e.g. a trade window that allows you to modify someone elses items whilest in turn they are able to give you currency, ALL within the same trade window.

22) Guild Stash controls. Let's talk about it, Chris Wilson said when they add new content, they have to look at what the game needs, I'm telling you now, the game needs better Guild systems, better controls for stashes. There needs to be CUSTOMIZABLE ranks. So I can set things like new member, member, veteran, officer, leader etc. This way I can set better controls on who can take what out of the guild stash. We literally had a guy join our guild, clean out the entire stash and then leave. Am I supposed to then make everyone officers and stop members removing things? What kind of security is that. It makes ZERO sense and again reinforces my argument of lack of incentives for a multiplayer experience. This game is growing in size very quickly and should have systems that work with that expansion.

23) Drops more often than not, do not reflect the effort put into the end result. Quite a majority of my friends don't even do bosses because they are simply too much of A) a risk B) time constraint. I find this disturbing that players directly involve content intended to be player because their is simply no incentive to do so. The drop system needs to reflect more often the effort put into the end result. Out of maybe 30 shaper runs I found 3 dying suns, I personally think myself very lucky, I know many others who have farmed similar quantity and received nothing.

24) WHY? Is there an artificial content wall between 90-100 and WHY? Has this been extended further. It does absolutely nothing for the health of the game, the only thing it succeeds at doing well, is to consistently push away long time players and even shorter term players because the path to the top of the mountain is too steep. I believe and feel the huge slow down in the popularity of leagues from beginning to end and the main reasons player retention does not happen is because of the frankly artificial progress gates at the end of the game that drive people to the point of insanity. People simply stop playing because they are unable to progress there character. This is further made frustrating by essentially the exact same end game content being available now as there was 2 years ago. The only reasons for increases in caps and extending lvl 90-100 play time is so slow down the rate of lvl 100's happening, this in turn extends the life of content available in the game, saving GGG money. THIS MUST CHANGE... for the health of the game and the health of it's long term player base. People need OTHER challenges that are actual challenges and not sand paper grinds.

25) BLEED!?!?!?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MECHANIC? When you're suddenly stacked with 8 bleed stacks that basically one shot you if you're not superhuman spamming your life flasks to gain life back. However, this is utterly POINTLESS because even with insta heal flasks and huge life regen you get insta killed. THIS IS BEYOND frustrating. This was the last nail in the god damn coffin, being 76% of the way to 96, clearing t-15's, guardians, shaper, ALL content and being insta killed by a mechanic that stacks so much damage you barely even get time to think about it, EVEN when you're stood still. I can't even begin to get my head round how frustrating this is in HC and I'm using a HC build.

26) EXP Penalty is the most frustrating aspect of this game, it's an utterly pointless feature that does absolutely NOTHING to deter people from spamming bosses to death, which is another completely BROKEN aspect of the game. WHY are people having to spam bosses? WHY is the casual player constantly met with progress walls that feel 1000 feet high instead of challenging. I suggest instead of an exp penalty the player is penalized through currency and it's either a choice, lose 10% experience or lose 10% of your total currency. The only way a feature like experience penalty makes sense is in a game where the mechanics actually WORK together, where instead of feeling like you want to uninstall the game or stop playing completely you're encouraged to try different methods and do things differently. The main problem with PoE is the contrast between the combat experience and the INSTANTLY harsh and huge oneshot or damage situtations. Almost ALL of the things that are considered "hard" are actually unexpected and often questionable deaths... e.g. "what the hell just happened". You should be able to LEARN from what death is not just find it a cumbersome and tedious experience.

27) The game is TOO fast. This is almost 90% of the problem PoE faces, Their is such a huge spectrum of builds, built for different purposes that it seems almost impossible to suit and satisfy all aspects of the player base. I seriously feel it's essential development of the game begins to find structured and smooth curved ways of creating new gameplay. Currently I think the game is far too fast, there are too many features that happen almost instantly with barely any kind of warning or trigger animation to follow it. Death feels like being hit with a fly swat instead of being challenging or explainable.

28) Optimization is truly horrible and sucks in almost every option available to try and make it better. Load times are hidious on most machines and often you're forced to go through many loading screens instead of being able to get to one destination quickly and ergonomically. Even on a seriously high end system I'm often exposed to very high levels of lag and FPS drops. Often resulting in crashes. When switching between areas or partying this is where the issues become their worst. Doing rotations of masters is something I see as a chore instead of an enjoyable experience. Most of the time people in parties crash or simply lag out because of d-sync/act of god whatever other crap the game decides is going to happen.

29) Updates take a century to happen on mostly all machines unless you're using an SSD or have a very fast processor. This is especially prominent and obvious in steam, it can take some of my friends 30-60 minutes to apply small patches.

30) Other ARPG games are coming. Big ones, with better systems, better optimization and more features to offer. I seriously see GGG facing new challenges and will seriously have to offer players more in what is better, constructive and creative content with fair and open ways of learning and experiencing the game.

31) The lab needs either removing from the game or changing/merging with another idea that keeps it relevent to the flow of the game and player progression. Currently the lab is nothing but an economy sink and something that deters and pushes huge parts of the playerbase away. Gating essential content behind something that is both tedious and frustrating for a large percentage of the player base makes no sense. It feels like GGG is forcing this content on us in an effor to say "Hey, I'VE MADE SOMETHING HERE, YOU SHOULD BE ENJOYING IT" even though it tastes like crap and most people hate it. Would I rub sand paper on my face if my boss told me it was a good idea? even though I know it hurts and makes blood come out of my face in pools. -_-

32) The amount of currency for viable end game builds required is FAR too high, ok, you want to save up for a headhunter, but be prepared to spend a good 2-3 weeks grinding to achieve it. This isn't fun, I also feels it's an artifical way of extending the progression feel of leagues however, it's a counter intuitive and counter productive design that ultimately forces most players away and causes player drop off over the course of leagues.

33) Map tiers make next to no sense, the higher the map tier goes the more rewards/good things that are meant to happen however, it's quite the counter to this, higher tier maps more often than not are expensive and really only become useful for xp gains/item bases whilest lower tier maps, burial chambers, spider forest, vault, I can go on and on, offer better rewards and much higher incentives to play them for multiple reasons A) They are cheaper B) Faster C) More profitable D) Less risk HC death or -10% xp lost.

My conclusion, path of exile while being a very deep and very complex game, offering a huge array of ways to play and experience it is a game that struggles to find out who it's supposed to appeal too. Is it supposed to be attracting elite and no life players or is it appealing to a casual genre. Is this game meant to be a tribute to diablo or is it dark souls? It's almost like it can never answer these questions because it simply doesn't know. While the game has brilliant and quite intoxicating experiences to offer players, it's far too obvious how much it's stuck together with PVA glue and duct tape. SO many features do not work with each other. Character animations still feel mostly broken and unappealing to see. It feels like more development time is spent on MTX and making water look prettier than actually optimizing the game to a constantly stable and playable thing. People want SO many aspects of the game to be fixed yet they never seem to happen, instead we are bombarded with more MTX and pretty water.

I seriously feel the development team need to take a look at HOW they create content. e.g. thinking about how systems they make create ACHIEVABLE goals. They have to be experiences people can learn from, not experiences that deter or push parts of the player base away. Which path of exile is doing a mighty fine job of right now. Achievements shouldn't be things people have to buy in games. They should be things players can achieve for themselves instead of having to pay someone 10 ex to identify an item. Or having to find something that has a percievable 5-6% chance of happening like a 2 socket unid dropping from a lich who takes 15-20 maps to find... -_-

Path of exile is a game that is in need of some huge polish, though I think it will take 1000 tins of polish and some seriously good RNG to fix it all. Or Chris Wilson decides to pull the imaginary lever in the GGG office.

lol ye

3) not so much. There are actually too many low tier uniques dropping to the point there are quite worthless.

The rest... yeah.

"

Grauthrim wrote:

My conclusion from all of this is that Path of Exile is a game of sharp contrasts, with absolutely amazing and astounding mechanics, systems and methods of play that clearly provide huge levels of entertainment but over a long period you begin to see the cracks, the duct tape and super glue holding the skeleton of what is a beautiful thing very much together. I hope dearly GGG continues to take steps towards making a fairer and more balanced game.

This. PoE could be so much better.

Chimera is the easiest guardian, minotaur is the strongest.

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

Chimera is the easiest guardian, minotaur is the strongest.

Find it the other way round if I'm honest

Which is weird because you don't like one shots and minotaur is the undisputed king of them.

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

Which is weird because you don't like one shots and minotaur is the undisputed king of them.

Not disagreeing with you, just stating which boss I felt was easiest, which also goes with one of my points. I found minotaur impossible on a cyclone build but a joke with a ranged build.

This game does not have a mode where individual players are supposed to win. Diablo 1, 2, Might&Magic, Wizardry, etc. were all geared for the player to be able to eventually win the game. This was done in a vacuum so deterministically awarding players great gear was ok. It remained within their solo game experience.

PoE forces a pseudo multiplayer by allowing full treading so players can't deterministically get great gear via quests. If PoE had a standalone mode, you could get 5-links and 6-links as part of quest progression. And someday, be strong enough to beat the final bosses with your own work completing the story line. Even if you're a casual.

Main problem i have with this league is the map drop rate and RNG challenges, like they are supposed to be 'challenges' not just spin the wheel and win. The map problem is retarded, not only it has to low drop rates and anti shaping mechanics but also getting shaper's orbs is absolute bullshit. I am still at 10/15 fragments and it doesn't matter if i spread the elder corruption to T15 maps because guess what, boss with fragment won't spawn. I think the new endgame is beyond frustrating and the sextant system needs a rewards, no because the stuff they add but in terms of blocking. Having half of my atlas blocked just to run shaped vaults is beyond disgusting.