Is PoE starting to suffer mechanics bloat?

So, these alternate leagues are great fun. Getting a little bit of a different perspective on the game from just a single added mechanic is really refreshing, and GGG should never stop doing them.

However, I'm pretty torn over the fact that every single league so far has been integrated into the main game and every subsequent league. We now have rogue exiles, shrines, nemesis mods, strongboxes, and to add on it, the new corrupted side-areas. That's five rare-spawned 'world events' added onto the vanilla game.

Now imagine half a year down the line. Strongboxes in every league, one or two more mechanics from the following leagues, one or two more mechanics from the ones following those. That's a lot of random stuff that can happen.

I feel this is starting to get problematic, for two reasons.
1. The game is starting to feel fragmented. Your ordinary progression of going through the areas, questing, or running maps is almost constantly interrupted by one of these random occurrences. To some extent that's good, but when you're getting more shrines, more strange nemesis mods, and more strongboxes than you're just completing quest objectives, it's easy to forget what game you're actually playing.
2. A lot of these random encounters are really pointless. Most shrines are in practice nothing but a big group of mobs: Resistance, Impenetrable, Hexing, Monstrous, and to lesser extent Fire, Ice, Shocking and Static shrines all have pretty minimal impact on your gameplay. Many Nemesis mods make zero difference: Vile Touch, Bringer of Weakness, Bringer of Elements, they're all forgetable compared to Corrupted Blood or Storm Herald. They might as well not exist, you really wouldn't notice.


In light of these issues, I implore GGG to do the following:
1. Don't add mechanics just because the league was well received. Add mechanics because they legitimately improve the design of the entire game. Rogues Exiles are awesome. Shrines are pointless (imo). Don't be afraid to remove older, less interesting mechanics to make room for the new, cooler ones.
2. Make sure that your mechanics are actually sufficiently impactful. Every Rogue Exile is an interesting encounter, both the easiest ones and freaking Xandro Blooddrinker. But Diamond Shrines are significantly more impactful than Hexing Shrines, Storm Herald is infinitely more dangerous than Vile Touch, and Gemcutter Strongboxes are far more rewarding than Jeweler or Artisan Strongboxes.

Avoid diluting the experience by bloating the game with random encounters that are more humps in the road than interesting change of pace. Don't be afraid to cut content that is not up to par. Rare encounters should always be challenging in their own right.

I disagree. It's a grinding game after all. It's best to have that monotony broken by stuff.

Disagree, I feel that all the mechanics added to the base game have made a signifigant improvement to the gameplay


It's boring just running around killing the same mobs all the time.


I ran into a storm herald the other day for the first time, blew my socks off.

I love finding shrines, not for the buffs, but for the large pack of mobs guarding them. XP!!

strongboxes will always be a welcome addition, especially the rarer ones. But not just for the loot, again they spawn 3 packs of mobs... huge XP boost when you're farming



I hope they keep adding more and more. Of course they will tune the spawn rates down over time as they add more but there will always be something unexpected around the corner.

The point is that some of these random encounters aren't doing their job of being interesting changes of pace. Getting too many of these uninteresting ones reduces the pool of interesting ones, and also reduces the excitement of finding the better ones a little.

This is especially the case for shrines. Diamond shrines and Acceleration shrines both make the mobs around them a major challenge, and really reward you for getting the tag. Most of the other shrines don't achieve this risk/reward challenge at all. And as a result, I find myself rather uninterested in the shrine icon on the map; until I realize it's a diamond shrine and I'm almost dead.

Agree with OP to some extent. It is good for dev to introduce whole new features, but at the same time the more feature they introduce, the less room for them to find new one. So sooner or later we will see many redundant designs, just like rogue exile can also be easily treated like an invasion boss.

But I remember back to CB dev also planned to make custom leagues so that should handle it.

I think the game lacked depth early on and is now more interesting, the more interesting things that happen the better the game play imo.

People in general just don't like change. If all these features were in from the word go then people wouldn't complain about them. As a smaller developer, GGG will take time to implement everything they wanted to include in the game.

they already nurfed all the cool mechanics out of the game... or to a point where they arent that viable anymore... so no

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Zvim wrote:

I think the game lacked depth early on and is now more interesting, the more interesting things that happen the better the game play imo.

People in general just don't like change. If all these features were in from the word go then people wouldn't complain about them. As a smaller developer, GGG will take time to implement everything they wanted to include in the game.

Most of these features do very little to add depth, though. You don't change your character builds or your approach to the game just because shrines can spawn. You may need a staunching flask just to fight Corrupted Blood. You may want to avoid Exile maps because you know you could get wrecked by Xandro. Those are good, functional random encounters. But a lot of them aren't, and doing away with the ones that are plain uninteresting can only give more spotlight to the interesting ones.

I agree if you look at the problem longterm (like 2 years from now), but at the moment there's no problem with this.