Today's Hotfix for Heist

It's amazing this patch even has to exist. It's difficult to read without rolling my eyes, who thought any of this was a good call? I'm hoping this and future patches can put some life back in this league.

I'm really wondering what kind of players you've got on your test team.

And why on earth did anyone on the dev team not comment about punishing us for killing in an ARPG?

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Choke Points in Heists
We are reducing the number of rare guards that can gather in formation behind Heist doors. This change should be out today. We're also planning to make it so that some monsters will release their skills in a staggered way so that you are not being hit by many skills simultaneously. Fewer monsters in these choke points will have their abilities ready to go as soon as the door opens. This should make these encounters more manageable and less about being blasted in the face with damage.

Never had a problem with this, as I just used a movement skill and dodge past everything stacked up on the door.
Personally the fact that the playerbase wasn't able to figure this out and needs the devs to change the gameplay for them is annoying at best.

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Killing Monsters Increasing Your Alert Level
We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

What a horrible change. Not only does it make the league completely braindead and once again entirely summoner friendly which is already braindead. But very likely they will increase the alert level gain from chests and so on to compensate.
So any incentive to play good will be removed, good players will get less loot over all.
AHHHHH but the brain dead players, they can finally just run around without a care in the world. League saved right?

Here is what the league needs.
Fix the bugs affecting heists so people don't get fucked over unfairly by gameplay bugs.
Fix crashes, DC so players don't get fucked over unfairly.
DON'T remove any kind of incentive for player skill and don't help players that get fucked over fairly.

I for the love of me don't see how removing alert form killing things is supposed to make it a better league.

great changes, amazing how fast these things get fixed. thx ggg :)

Choke Points in Heists
We are reducing the number of rare guards that can gather in formation behind Heist doors. This change should be out today. We're also planning to make it so that some monsters will release their skills in a staggered way so that you are not being hit by many skills simultaneously. Fewer monsters in these choke points will have their abilities ready to go as soon as the door opens. This should make these encounters more manageable and less about being blasted in the face with damage.

Guys, this is not the point. It's about Invul Auras and on death effect which you so much like. Dont make your game too easy too soon till it is boring.

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Killing Monsters Increasing Your Alert Level
We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

I was complaning about this in the official discord.

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My main grip with Heist, is that PoE has taught me over the years is to kill anything that as so much just breathes in your vicinity. Heist goes against that by punishing you for killing enemies.

Thank you for changing this :)

Killing Monsters Increasing Your Alert Level
We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

So alert level is just an Item Quantity modifier now. This is a solution to kiting guards being the optimal strategy, but a bad one, because it effectively removes alert level as a mechanic. Here is a probably better one:

1)Alert level increases when you are detected (with mb .5-1 sec delay to give you a chance to quickly kill a guard(s) that detected you) (with mb another .5-1 sec delay between you damaging the guard that hasn't detected you and him detecting you, so that ambushing guards is a viable strategy) and keeps increasing, as long as you stay detected. Yes, if you implement alert level this way, it would, with high enough damage and AoE, convert to "Killing Monsters Increasing not Your Alert Level", but if someone wants to play on Very Easy, they should be able to do so.

2)Show guards in a, like, 1.5-2 screen area around us on the map and their detection areas either on the map, or on the ground, so that we could better interact with the detection mechanic.

3)Make our companions only attack guards that have detected us (i haven't interacted with the league a lot, because i got disconnected before the exit in 2 out of like 10-15 heists, but i had a few instance, where my companion attacked the guard that seemed to not have detected me)

A few other suggestions that could improve Heist:

1)After lockdown, let all of our companions open all of the chests, not just Tibs(?) (mb someone else) and not just one per wing. We should be able to go loud if we want and are able to.

2)Give us an option to take out more loot than 1 inventory (idk, place a chest before the entrance?)

you know, ggg, you could have playtested this for an hour and made those adjustments before launch. just saying.

Well killing stuff to raise the alert level made no sense on a stealth point of view, but how does it work now ?

I mean, Path of Exile has a really close up camera so sneaking up on monsters was hard and Heist made it clear that the game isn't a stealth game. Guards not seeing us from 2 meters away was weird :/

My guess is that now alert level will rise by how long it takes to kill the guard, which will simply make the game go back to the usual mantra "go fast", which I find a little bit sad to be honest.



To me Heist was an experiment on GGG part and I, for one, am happy to see the studio trying to go crazy and fail from time to time instead of doing legion / breach clones every three months :)

And overall, I find the risk / reward aspect of this league pretty good. It's nice to start a heist and ask oneself if the last prize is worth it or not, or if one should smash some chests and fail on purpose.

Good luck with the balancing patches ^^ I think any veteran player knows by now that the first week is always a work in progress.

Best hotfix ever