Development Manifesto: Legion as a Core Game Mechanic

Anything added to the base game that reduces viable build variety is bad.

YAY! :D

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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illleech wrote:

Guys... Devs...

I believe you've read it like 123213123 times already but this league was not good at all in terms of balance and further development of the Game.

The only builds that are viable (not good, exactly viable) for Legion content are those that can clear screen with 2-3 actions.
With such leagues a player will not even want to try some new and/or cool builds because the player will simply have to skip content that You have been working on, no doubt, so hard.

Best wishes and no offence.

Players informed GGG of this huge problem last league too.

And the league before that.

And the league before that.

Chris thinks "fast = good," but nothing I've ever heard him say on the subject indicates that he realizes that League mechanics which change the above equation to "fast = viable" limit player choice by an absurd degree and (practically speaking) kill the choice aspect of this ARPG outright.

These two comments have to be sticked on the top.

[Removed]

boggers

Just remove HeadHunter now as i'm fed up to see people with 2-3 k life running continually 5 legions areas stupidly with 6 people in party.

This item is idiot and trivializes all the content

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Deliverme wrote:

Happy to see legion added to the game in some fashion. That said, unless significant changes are made to Temple, this just further dilutes it when it is already way too difficult to get T3 corruption room. I literally didnt get one the entirety of Legion, and I have a 98 and a 95. So plenty of time played.

Please fix Temple :(

Honestly Legion has (and will considering this manifest, particularly considering it'll be even rarer much like corruption room as they are adding a new room type instead of replacing one of the crap one) made the gem room probably obsolete as well, considering by the time you manage to get a T3 gem room, you'll have dropped several 21/23 gems.

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ACGIFT wrote:

The tl;dr of it is that it's not just hyper-clear, but done in a way that ONLY one build really does it well. This is why Legion had all of 3 viable builds:

• Cyclone. Using Headhunter, 2-3 IL, and self-tempchains; nothing could compare to how well it cleared the Domain of Timeless Conflict, a zone where your reward (EXP and loot) scaled directly with how quickly you could clear, with no real upper limit. (breachstones, at least, always took a fixed 2 minutes...)
  
• Essence Drain+Contagion. Nothing else could one-shot entire monoliths so readily. These guys spent all their time farming Glacier maps, since a T2 map gives basically the same legion rewards as a T16.
  
• Tornado Shot. Using standard MF gear, and always with an aurabot; it could still handle monoliths, just slower than ED. Basically a gamble that what you gave up in monoliths-per-hour you made up for in card drops.

You could also go TS + HH/IL for similar efficiency to Cyclone, but in the end even though it's a different skill, it's quite a similar build ;)

Actually you could had a couple more builds:

• vaal ice nova for glacier farming (better than ED+Contagion, one click unfreeze, one click kill, no moving, just might need a few more clicks if there's a general)
• (about as expensive as HH+IL builds) vaal arc: still not as efficient as HH+IL, but more versatile, as being able to 1 cast unfreeze / 1 cast kill the legion even in high tier maps, get 5 rows in DoTC solo, kill bosses (UE I'm not sure)

But yeah, this league was probably the most limited league in a long time as to the number of builds that were viable for the league content.

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feisty_fawn wrote:

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codetaku wrote:

What are you even *talking* about? The nerf doesn't apply until 3.8.0 hits. Just run your stones in the remaining weeks.

if you check the manifesto you will see:

"

To that end, we have increased the rewards for the first cycle of monsters, reducing them each revive cycle. Rewards from Legion Generals will not diminish, but the rewards from other monsters will diminish. We will not be adding a diminishing return for experience gained from the ongoing encounters.

also i did build which when played 4 way emblems i got full lines of loot when a minute remaining. Now i am unable to get 4 lines of loot for the entire time.

I did more than 50 sets, and after the weekend the loot dropped by 40-50%

No offence, justt tried to get some fun in the end of the league :)

Read it again:

• it specifically adress the integration of Legion into core, thus after the end of the league
• it is completely written in the future (*will*, etc.)

There has been no single change to DoTC in Legion league, and there won't be any before the end of the league.

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ACGIFT wrote:

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Qarl wrote:

To that end, we have increased the rewards for the first cycle of monsters, reducing them each revive cycle. Rewards from Legion Generals will not diminish, but the rewards from other monsters will diminish. We will not be adding a diminishing return for experience gained from the ongoing encounters.

This does show that GGG kinda missed the point here. No one was running 5-way encounters for the loot; it was pretty much always a losing proposition that you wouldn't make back your (currently ~3 exa) running a 5-way Domain. People ran it for the experience.

Path of Exile has an ongoing problem that EXP gains are painful... Unless you exploit the latest new loophole added. This was also really apparent during Betrayal, where (then-level 84) Chayula's Pure Breachstones gave insane EXP.

Grinding Gear Games needs to go back and take a look at the whole far-endgame leveling system, and adjust it; because as it stands, your choices are "grind to a virtual standstill doing normal content" or "abuse the hell out of the new league's system to blitz to 100 in a few hours." Neither of these are good.

My broader recommendation: re-adjust the "virtual level" of other difficult content, (It's really dumb that, with how dangerous a lot of content has gotten, you're basically better running white maps instead of red ones; the EXP reward isn't that much less!) while scaling down what we get from "super-special encounters."

This, times a lot. I remember they increased the xp required to level after 95 because the 1% were leveling too fast using HH, mirror gear, full party with support, and at the time sextant blocking. Though ever since all they did was make sure those 1% could actually still level as fast as before exploiting the latest loophole, while making other people have to grind even more either mindlessly in white maps for ages or a bit less mindlessly in more difficult and less rewarding content, with the occasional 10% xp loss on death.

And now they even keep the loophole in core, with every perk it has (non diminishing returns on xp, zone level, everythin), probably because it's really very much gated behind HH which gates a lot of people out of it by default. It's indeed about time they rework the XP of other content.

And leaving Domain of Timeless Conflict as is with simply diminishing return on loot while leaving HH interaction with it intact, and even more HH interaction with IL (which does not make sense when you read the description, considering that if you steal something once - all buffs with HH -, it's usually hard to steal it a second time - an additional buff with IL). It would be much more sane and balanced to have IL being an alternative (cheaper) option to HH:

• either you go HH and steal all buffs
• or you go 3*IL and steal 3 buffs

Stealing “all buffs + 3 you already stole but will steal again” is completely absurd.

I believe Domain of Timeless Conflict would be much more balanced and enjoyable for everyone if it was instead a total number of waves: HH and miror gear would just let you clear it in 3 minutes when other builds would take 15 minutes (or fail if not geared enough, obviously). And obviously, zone level should obviously either be nerfed to 83 like other end game content, or other end game content should be buffed to 84 as well an be reasonably balanced versus this; there is no skill at all in DTC, it's only about currency and abusing an item combination which is completely broken with this encounter specifically. It's appalling that not only did you not hotfix the shit at the beginning of the league when you saw the issue, but that you are now making that broken interaction core.

I do sure hope as well that with it going core they will reduce the lag Legion creates (not as bad as Betrayal but still) and largely reduce the “one shot from 2 screens away” and random one shot out of nowhere when you are even unfreezing the legion...
It would probably be wise as well to reduce legion sizes and probably make them more dense so that you do not pigeon hole people into a very selected builds like this league, again (very fast move speed and very large coverage, with the extreme being “one cast to unfreeze, one cast to kill” when other builds have to run around and have no chance to unfreeze all if they do not have both very high move speed and very wide coverage).

And it would probably be a good idea to brush up some previous league content with regards to the occurrences of their good stuff and the RNG seed, possibly using a system similar to evasion to limit streak. With 2 to 3 characters 95+ each league (with a lots of deaths after 90, so probably enough XP each time to get them to 100 if I had not died), I have encountered a single beast opening a portal to a bestiary boss in map since they exist. Delve is not great either with regards to the availaibility of bosses, and even simply to get to depths with level 83 mobs, specially with the scarcity of sulphite (though I still got 2 auls in 3 leagues, delve and this one, but ran a lot of it, just did not target farm sulphite to perma delve).

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Elendarulianreo wrote:

No mention of Legion Jewels? Those were a great idea with awful execution. They're impossible to evaluate unless you just happen to have a few leveled alts to cover all the jewel slots on the tree, and even in that extremely unlikely scenario, it's still a major pain to have to plug in the jewels one at a time into each slot and then try to evaluate them while having to keep in mind literally every single potential build.

Not reworking legion jewels, well... At least having the possibility to see what they would do in a particular jewel slot even if you do not have it unlocked would make them much less of a pita to use; though would be still very far from a good user experience with those (and that's not even considering trade obviously, given that GGG explicitely balances the game around trade, and thus making items that are basically untradable for the majority of players - you need either video proof or a trusted middleman, and obviously need a way to “market” it in the first place to find a buyer - makes no sense).