betrayal feedback

First post. Be gentle.

I picked up PoE a couple weeks ago (though I did play a bit a few years ago) and had some fun grinding up a few characters through the new campaign. I bought a few stash tabs and was stoked for the new league.

Betrayal hit, and I started up a character I knew I'd enjoy. The first few syndicate encounters were kind of fun, and I looked forward to them (except the trains). The fights were exciting and lasted a reasonable amount of time. My first hiccup happened on a syndicate fort, where the guy had some crazy healing on top of the healing totems that I'm still not sure how I won. Eh, RNG gonna RNG, no big deal.

FFW a few dozen levels, and I'm at the point of either GTFO'ing when I see a syndicate (although sometimes you have to trigger them, unfortunately) or just accept my fate to be one-shot. If this only happened a few times per act, I'd be ok with it, but these things happen on every single zone, seemingly. I'm so tired of dying.

I've got max elemental resists, a decent skill setup, and I mop the floor with everything else in the game. Bosses are nothing next to these ridiculously-designed encounters, and a lot of times they're unavoidable.

Big damage is fine. Bosses already do that. Weird, unavoidable damage is fine, too. But combine them into big, unavoidable damage that can stunlock and take you from max to dead within a second is just dumb. On top of that, if you die, you fail the objective on most encounters.

The way I see it, syndicate encounters should be about as dangerous as an exile or, at the most, a side boss. They shouldn't be the most difficult encounters in the game, especially since they're everywhere.

Totally agree, I just left a map because a syndicate's member was chasing me all over the map, when i just want get exp from mobs to level my char.


It would be nice if you could activate the event if you want to do it. In Delve you could decide when to go to the mine, and when the combat began.

Just an activation button like in the lovely azurite mine!!!!

Agreed.

The difficulty between trash mobs and syndicate mobs is just stupid.

Particularly since the trash dies so easy, there is no scope to experiment on trash to improve your build/approach before getting repeatedly killed by the syndicate mob.

There seems to be a huge difficulty spike between the area you are in and the special encounters. Even Einars beasts can get pretty obscene. Had a red beast in a t2 map that had so much resists+life reg I couldn't move his hp bar, while plowing through the rest of the map.

Agreed. Difference in sheer stats compared to normal bosses is beyond ridiculous.
Do we gotta grind lvl 1 maps at 68-95?

I shudder to think what the syndicate members will do in 8 mod red maps... Already in rare yellow maps any extra damage modifier means 2 hits KO.

Also there is this extremely weird combination of:

1. Stay near Perandus to know when hes channeling the spikes of doom.
2. Stay a screen away from any other syndicate member due to the massive random AOEs they throw, with little to no indication of where the AOE will hit.

I play essence drain + contagion, which is the most mobile build I've ever played, and still have difficulty finding time to just dot something every few seconds...

there are a few combinations of exiles that are currently out of scope for me.

perandus+snare is...who could come up with that?

also i am sure noone ever tested vorici on a multiple projectiles map. 15 voricis being shot at you is beyond absurd.