How Poe elites ruined Bestiary AND Incursion - Bestiary you will be missed.

One thing I liked about Bestiary was that I wasn't forced to do the whole "speed clear" streamer nonsense that is currently pushed onto us. It is nice being able to go at my own pace and smell the roses. Incursion doesn't have this option unfortunately...

Pokemon/Bestiary league was a great concept just poorly executed.

Just a little bump and a reminder, that incursion currently has less players after 2 weeks than bestiary after two weeks. lol

Source: http://steamcharts.com/app/238960#6m

LOL HE POSTED STEAM CHARTS WHEN a majority don't even use steam

HAHAHAHAH

NOBODY LIKES BEAST LEAGUE GET OVER IT

60% use steam, confirmed by GGG LUL

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Lewnatic wrote:

a.) Powercreep: By Adding complexity in the play-style the game shifts it focus from Meta and clear speed towards rewarding the player for focus and slow play and to not one-shot everything. This was of course highly criticized by a lot of streamers, redditers, botters and RMTers because it felt "clunky".

PoE indeed suffers from massive powercreep, but it cant be fixed with mere league mechanics. Adding bestiary mechanics into game, "balanced" around oneshotting full screen and running at supersonic speeds, causes only frustration.
Whole game must be rebalanced. Enemies should have less quantity, higher HP and lower damage. Damage scaling for both players and monsters should be revised, especially - lots of multilicative damage multipliers, that can easily bring it to absurd levels.
Sure, players will always build for maximum clearspeed. But PoE allows too high clearspeed, futhermore, it severely punishes builds that kill slowly (because enemies have too high damage, and killing them first actually makes you MORE "tanky", than investing into defences). In other ARPG games, like Grim Dawn, it's impossible to have such absurd clearspeed, because AoE and movespeeds are kinda limited. Also, tankiness is much more encouraged there, because in endgame mode (Crucible), if you die, you lose a lion's share of your loot.

Perhaps Bestiary could successfully be reworked/simplified based on the premise of letting us choose to either:

A. Focus on clear speed for more standard loot (i.e. with random rolls)
B. Focus on precision for less standard loot but also some loot with guaranteed properties (e.g. boots with movement speed)

If a way can be found to do this without being cumbersome or too difficult for the devs to maintain then I think Bestiary would be much better received.

One way to do this would be to:

- Do away with the menagerie and nets
- Reintroduce randomly spawning rare beasts
- Once a rare beast reaches low life, it briefly enrages
- If the beast is alive when enrage wears off, Einhar ports in and captures the now exhausted beast
- Each captured beast is turned into 'blood points' which Einhar stockpiles, more blood points are given by higher level beasts
- We can purchase/craft items from Einhar for blood points
- If we kill a beast it drops increased loot, with a chance to drop random items which can be bought from Einhar, and Einhar himself taunts its corpse ("you were neither a survivor nor were you food!")

Regarding how to access the First Ones:

- Every killed/captured rare beast makes the First Ones angrier at us - this is tracked internally as a score which increases based on the level of each killed/captured beast, each of our characters has their own score
- When the First Ones are angry enough at a given character, a legendary beast spawns in place of the rare beast we just killed/captured - this legendary beast scales with our character level (like prophecy enemies) and drops a fragment which Einhar can use to open a portal to a First One of our choice
- First Ones can neither be captured (because they are too strong for Einhar) nor killed (because they are immortal in their home dimension), but depleting their life causes them to flee and drop one of their uniques + an orb for crafting their aspect skill onto an item of our choice
- Visual/audio warnings are given as legendary beasts get closer to spawning, like distant unearthly roars and/or the ground shaking when an rare beast is killed
- Perhaps Einhar could fight alongside us against First Ones like Alva does
- To limit farming low level areas for First One access, there could either be a level requirement for angering them or anger gained could scale exponentially with level such that low level farming is impractical

Extras:

- A unique map based on the menagerie could be made with a 'free' legendary beast in it

What I really miss from Bestiary are flask-related crafting recipes. It was so refreshing to be able to deterministically craft flask I wanted using beastcrafting rather than spam orb of alternations in hope to get right combination of prefix and suffix on a flask.

Leveling items and uniques were also great idea that made leveling characters a lot more interesting.

Last I think some of exotic currency recipes would be great to keep, limited availability but still available for crafting once in a while. I would love to use Horizon or Harbinger orbs to help with Atlas progression (because it is pain in the ass!).

The rest was too random, too tiresome and too obscure to be maintained. Unfortunately, related UI and bestiary areas very just to taxing to maintain and did not fit the game mentality.

"

LOL HE POSTED STEAM CHARTS WHEN a majority don't even use steam

HAHAHAHAH

NOBODY LIKES BEAST LEAGUE GET OVER IT

Steam player base is enough to get a good picture

I am still convinced the sustained population in Bestiary was migration to Standard and not sustained within the league - I feel like it was the least popular league of all time, and that is saying something. I think the massive flop drove players to Standard VERY early and they continued to play through the league interval - in Standard.

This would be in opposition to a league that held some interest for a while but burned people out and they actually quit the game completely until the next league.

I know, conjecture at best, but I've yet to be convinced otherwise.

As such, I would expect Incursion to have a lower sustained population than bestiary but in line with previous leagues like Abyss and Harb, but less than Legacy.

It feels like the complete lack of polish from GGG is what makes their leagues undesirable. Think about it, they completely switched from trying to polish and constantly update the game to big 3-month interval patches with almost nothing inbetween. So we play unbalanced content for months then after its over we once again play another unbalanced content for months. It'll bite them in the ass eventually.