Corrupted zones are content that's better off being skipped during progression

While progressing through cruel and now merciless, I've come to the conclusion that bosses in corrupted zones are becoming so hard that I'm better off skipping them until I reach end game and have decent gear. Or I can zerg the bosses if I just leveled (yay softcore).

I think there's a real missed opportunity here because I enjoyed these zones a lot during normal difficulty. I think they were some of the best new content to be added to PoE in a long time. Making them out of reach during mid-high level progression just kills it. Content that's better off being skipped is not good content.

What will happen is when I reach lvl 75+ and have good gear, I'll run through low level zones to hunt for the (midnight) fragments. It will be a huge bore during which I won't get XP/currency. It would have been a lot more fun if the damage of these bosses would have been tuned appropriately for the level of the content so that I can keep doing them as I level my character.

Not really fun, is it?

corrupted bosses too strong? => call a friend with a higher level char for help.
no friend online? => skip the boss.

you're high level and there's no fun in lower level areas? => create a new char.

Yes, after reaching merciless I started avoiding corrupted areas for a couple of reasons:
- I still don't know many of them
- my gear sucks (still using item form act 1 cruel, RNG probably hates my character)
The last boss I tried, because I leveled just before it, was the one in chamber of sin: a Burned Miscreation with lighitng warp that could catch up with me in no time, while doing tons of damage (I have only 22% fire res, but didn't expected something that couldn't be avoided).

And the reward can hardly be worth the work.

Haven't done any corrupted areas since A3C, at that point the bosses just became batshitcrazy.

They have to account for a common thing people do of twinking characters later.

Agreed. I had a similar thought watching a streamer yesterday in Invasion. Anytime their group came upon one of the new invasion uniques, they ran and created a new instance -- these were guys who knew what they were doing. Obviously HC swings the risk/reward calculus even further toward exercising caution, but it was disappointing that the new content is so dangerous/ insufficiently rewarding that people go out of their way to avoid it.

One of the philosophies that the D3 team talked about recent was a desire to increase the "time to death" in difficult encounters. That's not to say make death less frequent per se', but to provide more opportunity for good strategy & execution to serve as the differentiating factor between success and failure. People love a good challenge, but there's a tipping point where it turns from fun to frustration. I think GGG has always envisioned PoE as riding that line and saw this patch as a way to bring it back to that. It will be interesting watch how the meta develops.

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M59Gar wrote:

Corrupted zones are better off being skipped, period.

Well, gotta get those fragments somehow right?? Cause Atziri is hiding behind a thick layer of RNG.

The more players skip corrupted content, the faster the developers will understand that they did something wrong. Skip this content as it is not there. Do not farm Atziri's map pieces. Do not use vaal gems. Do not kill retarded corrupted/invasion bosses. All of this is bad gamedesign in its core.

P.S. Dear developers, please, take no offense if you read this. PoE is an awesome game, and it's totally free. You did a great job, really. But... Let's face it: the only good thing in this patch are ambush strongboxes and maybe vaal orbs. Everything else is "meh". Please, fix corrupted content ASAP.

Even in normal mode some of them are obscene. The first couple I ran into were ranged in difficulty from a decently scary rare monster to a zone boss like Merveil (though without the predictability). Then I'm just progressing along and all of a sudden I start getting bear traps thrown at me so fast that I can't ever move. It was like Perpetus on crack had decided to show up in Fell Shrine.

(Now, I will say, if by the time I get to high level I don't have any movement or ranged skills, that's on me. But when I'm level 18, with whatever sockets and gems I happen to have found in an hour or two of game play, no.)