3.20 Balance Manifesto: Eldritch Altars

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Bogumil wrote:

"Eldritch Altars are currently too rewarding"

Your simulation have shown you this? Our you have seen people getting multiple mirror per day using Eldritch Altars...

I have never stooped playing POE because it was to rewarding, but multiple times I have stooped because I had to grind endlessly...

It's too rewarding because of the type of gameplay it encourages. They literally tell you this in the post. Just like when speed clearing white maps was the meta because it was the most rewarding.

"- To give you a specific example, if you run maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds, you'll see Divine Orbs from the 'Basic Currency Reward' more than twice as often as before. "

the chance of getting divines is doubled on eater of worlds altars?
if so, it makes people choose eater of worlds more i guess

I am concerned with the amount of Altar spawn increase.

For an average Build/Player stacking up to many Altars made the map quickly really hard or even too hard. And now with more Altars spawning it gets out of hand even quicker. There will be more Altars you have to skip, which will feel bad. And then at the same time the impact on reward per altar got nerfed which means you really need to click every Altar for it not to feel bad.

Also more Altars per map means more stopping, reading and then calculating if this is gonna break your map or if its still managable.

I am onboard with your thought process, but i am really unsure about the execution.

Maven boss rushing is back on the menu boys!

60 packs to 20? HUH?

I ain't even mad

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Previously, Eldritch-Influenced Maps would always spawn exactly 60 packs within a map. They will now spawn somewhere between 20 and 60 packs per map.

It's really hard to understand why you guys think that players want less predictable risks and rewards. The complaint about risk x reward balance is that the game felt like too much of a crapshoot with loot goblins and players being unable to opt into a risk x reward ratio that they felt rewarded them appropriately for the time and effort put into it. As the meme goes, no one felt "burdened by predictability." If anything, the debacle with loot goblins and removing certain harvest crafts last league should tell you that players want MORE predictability, not less.

Making stuff more random while removing the option to opt into higher risk x reward (for example by stacking eldritch keystones, or the general flattening of the effect of juicing maps) just means there's less account-wide/league-long progression players can engage with.

Also we are still waiting on some kind of communication regarding whether replica conqueror's efficiency will be preserved. Removing it along with the regular version will make one of the most popular build archetypes in the game (COC) significantly worse. It's a build-enabling jewel. Adding -mana to the jewel mod pool doesn't fix the issue due to crit multi already taking most of those mod slots anyway.

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Felkin wrote:

If I understood this manifesto correctly, GGG considers boss-rushing to be a self-sabotaging gameplay strategy. Thus, this strategy got nerfed for altars.

My question is this: then why keep the Maven invitation farming the same from a mechanical perspective? Nerfing altars and buffing map bosses under Maven will simply make people who did boss rushing with altars move to boss rushing with Maven.

So is it just that for altars specifically that boss-rushing wasn't intended, but for Maven it's ok, or am I misunderstanding?

As a side note: When I read Maven changes, I was immediately hoping for some sort of system change where clearing a map somehow buffs up the map boss to incentivize running more of the map and not just bum rush to the map boss...

What you're misunderstanding is they aren't saying boss rushing is inherently bad gameplay, they're saying it's bad gameplay for map clear reward structures to reward you more for blitzing the boss before clearing. That said their "fix" might not actually fix the problem, they should've just removed the boss kill reward types or simply allowed them to still roll even if the boss was already killed.

Maven is fine to them the way it is because she's always just been about the bosses so boss rushing was the design goal and reward structure from the start. You aren't purposefully avoiding the mechanic in preparation of making the most out of the mechanic.

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LloydIrving89 wrote:

"- To give you a specific example, if you run maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds, you'll see Divine Orbs from the 'Basic Currency Reward' more than twice as often as before. "

the chance of getting divines is doubled on eater of worlds altars?
if so, it makes people choose eater of worlds more i guess

No the chance of getting that specific mod is doubled. So it goes from like 0.06% chance to get that mod to 0.12%.

Still gonna be RARE AF, but it will be less rare than if you ran the other type of alter.

Edit: Too tired after delving. Delve is amazing!

+ awakened gems, good change!
- altars, i don't like clicking.

#AltarSkillTreeWhen

Zzz