League thoughts / Report card

My HC friends left =/ sad face I was really hoping to play with them they didn't like the update at all.

Still a D+ even after the update =(

Legacy was 1/10 points
Harbinger is -1/10 points

At least the next league has to be better else the shitstorm will be real

Into the middle of act 10 now and overall I'm upgrading my initial D grade based of getting all the way through SSF Harbinger act 4 without getting any good gear drops. I love lots of things in PoE, quality gear starvation is definitely NOT on my list of why I play PoE. Now that I have made the shift from melee (which is still garbage for any descent clear speed) for low leveling to my final build as a fire trapper CWC Firestorm Berserker (The Incinerator) the mob pack killing and clear speed is way up so I'm able to progress faster. PoE 3.0 is even more of a starvation for gear than most previous leagues. I only got one 5 socket 2 handed weapon to drop in SSF Harbinger league so far and a paltry few low level uniques, none of which are any good for a Scorching Ray fire caster. But in spite of this the Scorching Ray CWC Firestorm still works well as a 4 link setup.

I am revising my overall FoO grade to a B. The new background music is A+, the acts 5 through 10 are ok and while it is interesting to see how GGG re-used the tile sets of the first 4 acts plus some maps in various combinations, most of the zones still feel like too much drudge work to pass through to get to the next battle that continues the story line. A few zones (such as The Reliquary) are visually beautiful. Most are just re-used tile sets and thus are mostly un-interesting. Anyway, I rate the zone layouts a C.

I was getting super Time Frame lagged out in the boss battles so that was an F until some one suggested that I should delete my Minimap files. The Minimap folder is where a temp file is created for every zone traveled to and thus you quickly end up with 100s or 1000s of small files. Too many files was causing PoE to crash to single digit frame rates in my Windows 7 in any boss battle or large mob packs. Since I now have a working solution to this severe lag problem this is the reason I now give overall performance a C.

The voice acting is a mix of good and ho-hum so that gets a B grade. Some of the text doesn't match the dialogue exactly (follow up clean up work is needed here) but nothing game breaking. I guess GGG ran out of time so act 10 NPC Lani (Oriath Docks) doesn't speak.

Edit: With patch 3.01 upping the Harbinger mobs so now it's not an AFK challenge and is more interesting I give it a C+ grade. The shard drops are still overall ho-hum in spite of GGG stating that they upped the quality and quantity. GGG needs to double it.

Divine vessels are as rare as exalts. Harbingers drop less loot after the nerf. (and transmute shards are still dropping in maps. Wisdom scraps as drops. The genii at ggg strike again!)

-2 for the league

7 for the expansion. Crashing on Cathedral Rooftop every time I tried to enter to find the damn vaal area is not fun.

id say the league concept is about a D+

its just dull c- at best

3.0 is about a B+

I think their strategy was to underwhelm the fuck out of newcomers before 3.1.

It's actually kind of brilliant. Setting garbinger as the baseline means anything they do next will feel like atlas of worlds of ascendancy.

I have to applaud GGG for such brilliant design.

The 3.0 update is nice in my opinion, albeit it feels a bit rushed and not as polished as it could have been. Everything after a4 is so silent and our exiles not commenting stuff like we are used to kills immersion a bit. The same applies to missing npc voices and all the areas that use recycled music or sound effects in general. Other than that leveling is smoother now and progressing into the higher acts feels good.

Harbinger on the other hand, oh well. I don't like it. I skipped Legacy because I didn't enjoy the clusterfuck that was leaguestone management and hoped for something more simple for the next league. Guess what, I was wrong - Harbinger is so simple and dull, I don't even bother killing them anymore. I played one character to 90 and one to 81 in SC SSF and got a total of 2 ancient orbs and one annulment orb. Now I could trade for them by not being SSF but that is not the point - Harbingers feel like a nuisance at best and not rewarding at all. I'd argue even Prophecy was more rewarding than Harbinger.

As it looks Ill push another character to 90, SSF HC this time, and call it quits until the next league. Harbinger is more or less a public beta anyway. I'll give it another go in November with a hopefully better league.