Feedback after completing the Bestiary league

WARNING: extremely long post!

I have finished my 40 challenges in the Bestiary league and killed everything there is to kill in the game. I made a lot of notes during this league. Here's my feedback for GGG: the good, the bad and the ugly. The points/issues are stated first, followed by my proposals (where I have any).

Spoiler alert: there is much more bad than good, and I don't like the current state of the game and the latest design decisions to such a degree that I will most likely skip 3.3 entirely and consider returning for 3.4 only if I see some changes that may address these issues.


The Good Things

- The beastcrafting creates some really nice options. I like that. I loved the Essence league for the same reason. Definitely a good addition to the game. But it needs a whole lot of improvements (see below).

- New endgame content. I'm tired of Uber Atziri, she is so 2014. The Shaper is getting old, as well as most of the map bosses. So I'm glad to see a new uber boss. If only that boss wasn't such a massive disappointment (see below).

- Perandus Manor was removed from the Atlas. Good riddance!
Now please take the next step and remove the Hall of Grandmasters. This abomination has no place on the Atlas. It's not even a real map. Those who care about PvP can still run it via the map device.


Bestiary Feedback

- It's too intrusive. It gets in your face whether you are interested in it or not. It wastes your time. These beasts are much more dangerous and harder to kill than the Nemesis rares. Skipping them is often too dangerous or not an option at all. And they are everywhere you go!
Make them much less frequent.

- The random beasts can ruin your leveling. You can encounter things too OP too early. Example: I ran into a red (legendary) beast in Act 7 that was Quick, had Corrupting Blood and Farric Presence. It chased me at higher speed than me while spawning legions of adds, and I couldn't even touch it without getting absolutely destroyed. After several deaths to that horror, I just started to port out and spawn a new instance every time I saw a red icon on my map during the rest of the Acts. And the yellow ones were often too dangerous to touch as well.
Nerf them. Make them much less powerful at low levels. Remove the legendary beasts from the Acts completely.

- Some random mod combinations are just insane on those high hp beasts. Life Regen + Corrupting Blood, Quick + Tiger Prey, Proximity Shield + Fertile/Farric Presence, to name a few.
Go over all possible combos and disable the ones that are too OP.

- Can't see the type of the beast! It shows a completely useless random name because they are all rares. But it doesn't show what it is! I can see that it's a snake, but what kind of a snake? To make things even more confusing, the same words are used in the beast type and the mods: a rhex with Saqawine Presence is not necessarily a Saqawine Rhex??
Show the beast type in the monster info.

- Carrying the nets reduces your inventory space. You want to carry at least 2 types (normal and Necro), or maybe even 3 (for low and high tier maps), so that space in your inventory is permanently gone. This is not good.
Make the nets usable from the stash.

- The menagerie is a totally unwanted PITA that costs the player a lot of time and currency. When I see a beast, I have to think: do I need this beast for any recipe at all? Do I have enough space for it? Will it replace another valuable beast if I capture it? And then what to do with all these beasts that I have? They are all usable for dozens of recipes, but do I care about those recipies? Once in a while I need to clean it up and remove the trash beasts that I don't need. It costs some serious currency! In this league alone, I was forced to 'convert' about 300c to 300 alc cleaning up my menagerie.

- Why does it cost currency to get rid of unwanted beasts? Why can't I just throw them out or at least kill them myself without any recipe? This makes no sense.
Add a way to delete or kill beasts.

- What purpose does the Menagerie area serve? Why did you make that whole zoo? Nobody ever goes there. Why would anybody possibly want to stare at a cage full of snakes or monkeys? It looks like a total waste of resources to me.
Get rid of the zoo. Change it into a normal instanced area similar to Aspirant's Plaza, with just the Blood Altar and Eihnar in it.

- There are warning messages when there is only enough space for 1 more of this beast type and when you fill the last available space. And after that the new beast just replaces the lowest level(?) stored beast without any warnings, or simply goes to waste if all stored beasts are higher level. This is bad!
Show a message about it, and don't auto-replace anything.

- When you click a bestiary orb to add a beast from it, if there is no space available for it, the orb simply disappears and you get nothing!
Show a warning message if there is no space available and don't consume the orb.

- Why are the limits on the number of captured beasts so low? Why are they different for different beast types? Why can't I keep thousands of captured beasts regardless of their type? Is this in any way related to the resource limitations of the Menagerie area (that needs to be able to render them all on the screen)? If so, getting rid of the Menagerie will solve the issue.
Remove these limits or make them a whole lot higher. It there must be a limit, limit the total number of stored beasts and remove the type based limits.

- Even if the limts are relaxed, deciding what to do with the beasts will still be a permanet headache. When you encounter a beast, of course you want to capture it. But then you end up with stockpiles of those captures beasts.
Add a way to vendor them directly from the storage (without putting them into bestiary orbs), for varied amounts of currency depending on their level and mods. This can replace the need for deleting unwanted beasts.

- The Captured Beasts tab is terrible to navigate, can't be sorted and resets to the top if you add or remove any beasts.
Change it into a list sortable by type, level, mods. Make that list remember the current position when you add or remove beasts.

- There are too many useless recipes! Sure, some players somewhere at some point in the league might want to make each one of those things. But any one player will never care about 90% of those recipes.
Add a way to hide any unwanted recipes (not just the ones that I lack the components for).

- When using a recipe, I have to check if this recipe consumes a beast that I'm saving for a more valuable recipe. Accidentally using a Craicic Watcher in a recipe that takes any rare of the Depths would be a disaster! You have to look which beasts are auto-selected and check the long list of the recipes shown for each of them. This is bad.
Add a way to 'bind' beasts to a recipe. I want to select a known recipe in the list (whether I have a full set of beasts for it or not) and mark the beasts selected for it as 'bound' and make them unavailable for any other recipes.

- After a recipe is unlocked for the first time, there is no way to tell when you can use it again. You have to remember (or write down) the beasts you need for this recipe. Or several recipies that you are farming. This is a total PITA!
Add a 'notify when ready' checkbox to each recipe, so that when I capture a beast that completes it the game tells me that I can use it now.

- Saqawal, First of the Sky, is a flightless dinosaur. What Sky?? It makes no sense!
Either rename him or change him into a bird, or at least a pterodactyl.

- The thing with the Necromancy Net and the poll about it was so fake and staged that it felt insulting. Just 1 day after it narrowly won the poll, everything was patched into the game, including the necro capture animation and the fully functional bestiary orbs. You just made all that in 1 day? Or it was already pre-made and you would consider throwing it away if the poll failed? Oh please! Quite obviously, it was a planned feature that just wasn't ready until after the launch. But why the spectacle?
Don't do that again.


Uber Elder

- The quest to unlock him is absolutely ridiculous. I'm talking about spawning the T15 Elder for the 15th Memory Fragment. In 3.1 it was completely retarded, I never got him in the whole league (and I completed 40/40 there too) despite using all the 'smart' reddit strategies. But at least it was optional there, not getting one Shaper Orb didn't really matter.

Now it's no longer optional if you want to see the new uber boss and complete all challenges. It was made somewhat easier, but it's still a total atrocity of an RNG lottery. I spent over 200 hr of play time in this league banging my head against this wall before I finally got him.

This quest made me rant and rave and want to punch somebody in the face, while jealously watching more lucky players fight the boss that was simply not available to me. It left me so aggravated that I've decided that I will not support GGG until the end of this year no matter what gets released in 3.3 and 3.4. If enough players vote with their wallets, perhaps it can make the designers consider their decisions more carefully.

The one responsible for this quest had the data from the entire 3.1 league at his disposal, and he either failed to interpret it properly or made a conscious decision to keep this boss gated behind this insane RNG. Either way, I have just two words as my personal feedback to this individual, and they start with the letters F and Y.
Remove this crazy RNG gating. Make the Elder spawn location less random. It's enough that he has to be spawned on your own Atlas and cannot be bought.

- The fight itself is designed to force the player to dodge incoming damage. Invulnerable boss taking cheap shots at you while you can't fight back. Teleporting boss constantly getting away from you. This fight is anti-melee, anti-tank, anti-leech. It seems to be designed for the 'automatic damage' builds: totems, minions, RF - things that deal the damage for you while you spend your entire time dodging the boss attacks. This is bad design. It screws all other build types.
Reduce the damage of the invulnerable boss. Reduce the frequency of the Shaper teleporting.

- The loot is even worse than the fight itself! Rings, rings, rings, rings, rings... Rings that are worth nothing unless vaaled and bricked! A quiver and a staff that nobody wants. A rare drop helmet that's OK but still can't even justify the cost of running this encounter. And an ultra rare weapon that's cool but not really better than its much more common Shaper counterpart. Farming the Uber Elder is not profitable at all! This is Uber Atziri all over again, except that her rare drops were far more valuable at the time. The risk vs reward here is absolutely terrible.
Make this boss more accessible and/or buff his loot (except maybe Indigon).


Other Bad Things

- Invulnerable bosses that keep attacking you while you can't fight back. This seems to be a trend lately. Garukhan, Shakari, Eradicator, Uber Elder, and finally Vilenta - the pinnacle of idiocy where the invulnerable phases take 90% of the fight. Just wait till they add a high tier map with a boss based on her...
STOP! Just stop making this crap! Turn back and undo it before you ruin the game completely. Change these fights, get rid of these invulnerable 'dodge or die' phases. They are no fun. They are stupid.

- What did you do to the map drops? I was never into the sextant abuse, grouping or Bisco's, but something definitely changed between 3.1 and 3.2. Maintaining a high tier map pool in 3.2 is noticeably harder. My guess is that something was done to counter the increased Atlas bonus that went from 126 to 157, or to counter the effect of sextants even though they got nerfed at the same time. This is too much of a nerf.
Un-nerf the red map drop rate.

- Spam! OMG the fucking currency seller spam! You can't join any chat channel without seeing this crap. On some days (especially early in the league) it was so bad that you couldn't go 10 seconds without getting spammed with multiple lines of it.

The community has been requesting a client side custom regex chat filter since before this game was even released. Search these forums, and you can see the requests for this feature in every league, dating all the way back to 2013. Yet, for some reason, we still can't have it.

At this point it has to be somebody's conscious decision not to implement it. Or any restrictions on the chat channel usage for new accounts. Or anything else to fight this cancer. The dev team can spend a day of development to create a novelty PvP arena for a 1 day event, but they cannot spend a day to tackle this problem? Whether or not it has anything to do with one of the GGG shareholders being a former (or current?) owner of a number of RMT websites - I'll leave that to the reddit crowd to speculate about. But this is getting totally out of hand and something must be done about it.
Banning the spammers after they post their spam is not enough. We need a solution that would prevent this spam from being posted in the first place. And if it's too hard to do on the server side, let us help ourselves on the client side, give us the custom chat filter already!


Conclusion

After completing this league and seeing the first announcement of the upcoming 3.3 release, I'm strongly leaning towards skipping 3.3 entirely. Because:

- The Bestiary will be added to the core game. There is no doubt about that. Unlike the league mechanics of the past, it's obvious that the decision was already made before the league was even released. Way too much work has been done on it to even consider throwing it away. It cannot be an optional Zana mod either - the Menagerie, Blood Altar, Bestiary orbs can't be restricted to a map mod. So yes, it will be added to the core game. I just hope Chris doesn't pretend to be thinking about it and considering not adding it. One spectacle with the Necro Nets was enough.

But there are too many imperfections needing to be improved, issues needing to be solved, features needing to be added before the Bestiary can be considered a well functioning part of the game. I don't believe that it can be done before the 3.3 release, especially since the focus of the development is on the skill/balance changes and some new content. More likely, the gradual improvements to the Bestiary will continue for many patches, and it will remain a PITA all the way through the 3.3 league.

- Seeing as the Uber Elder quest was only slightly adjusted in 3.2, and its main gating mechanic remained unchanged, I expect it to remain gated behind this insane RNG for at least one more league before enough people cry about it. I refuse to go through this torture again and won't even consider playing in a new league as long as this atrocity remains the way it is. This potentially can make me skip not just 3.3 but also subsequent releases and lose interest in playing PoE completely.

- The main feature of 3.3 will be the skill/balance changes. Oh boy! I have absolutely zero trust in the ability of the balance team ('with thousands of hours of PoE experience') to get it right without screwing up. If their track record is any indication, we are going to get some good and well balanced changes alongside with some completely broken OP skills, plus a horde of bugs and crashes that will take months to fix. I won't be surprised at all if they buff Zerphi and GC again or make some lv 1 skill capable of 1-shotting the Shaper in some smart setup that they fail to think about. I expect the game to be an imbalanced mess for at least a few patches following the 3.3 release.

- The new content in the 3.3 league can't be anything major. It's not even the main focus of the league. We've just got a new uber boss, they won't add another one so soon. In all likelihood, it will be something like the Breachlords or the Abyssal Liches. Not enough to make it interesting. Good time to take a break and try to forget the bad stuff.

- It will be a Breach/Harbinger type league with tons of extra mobs, i.e. more of the clear speed meta. I'm just not interested in that. I already have two lv 100 characters and have no desire to make another one. I like difficult content. There is nothing difficult in blowing up hordes of trash in T9 maps. This alone wouldn't be a reason to skip a league, but it adds to the reasons above.

Overall, I'm disappointed in the recent design decisions, unhappy about the current state of the game, and I fully expect 3.3 to be a crappy league. But I still like this game and hope that my feedback can reach somebody who can turn it around and push it in the right direction.

Thanks for listening!

That was a good read.

You've raised some valid gripes and I'm sure a lot of players, myself included, will agree with you.

Only one thing I disagree with - using nets from the stash - I think there is a reason why this can't be done? (Something about servers/instances?)

And thankyou for your wonderful WI build guides :)

Another good read from vet player..

Its the second one today.
I will duplicate my re from similar one just now to here too:

Eh.
Sad but true.

And I feel twice sad seeing good old players leaving more and more.
And my friendlist from good old times - they are usually 0 online even sundays.
Sad to see this.

Thanks for this post, it's well thought out & very readable. Hopefully someone from GGG reads this and takes some of the advice, if not all of it into account with future design plans

If i could tag some recipe, then the game show me all bestiary monster for this recipe in map. This could increase the QOL a lot

I'm totally agree with you. Especially in Uber Elder part.

I have seven 40/40 challenge totems, but sorry, game, in this league you want too much of my time without real reason for this.

Also I just want to add something that I don't like in current state: game right now strongly affected by market interactions. You go to market if you want good gear, because RNG is insane. You go to market if you want open atlas, because RNG is insane. You go to trade chat if you want to lab trials, because RNG is insane. You go to market or trade chat if you want complete some challenge, because RNG is insane.

Why? This is not an economic simulator where I must live on market. This game even not a MMO.

Problem of this state in fact when I want to 'play the game' and not in economic simulator - game punish me hard, because even simple things can be non obtainable by normal play of people who have fulltime job. I realised in this league that I'm not a target audience of this game. Also I bought this game about five times for full AAA price. I hope that your real target audience can invest you in future, GGG.

GG GGG.

P.S: I have some feedback about bestiary.

A good read, and I agree with most of the things.

Except:

Make them much less frequent.
and
Nerf them. Make them much less powerful at low levels. Remove the legendary beasts from the Acts completely.

Yes, they are dangerous and could do with some tuning esp in the lower levels.
The frequency in which the show up is fine, it's just that they are tad too hard at lower levels atm.


But removing them from the acts? No, absolutly not! It's bad enough that probably 99% of all the players wont ever see the final beast areas, so to remove the legendary beasts from probably 85-90% of the player population would be a bad idea!

"

Bestiary Feedback

- It's too intrusive. It gets in your face whether you are interested in it or not. It wastes your time. These beasts are much more dangerous and harder to kill than the Nemesis rares. Skipping them is often too dangerous or not an option at all. And they are everywhere you go!
Make them much less frequent.

You must be kidding me!?

if anything then the beasts are way to rare! I have found only three portal beasts, I am half way to 91, did hundreds of maps! Many recipes like the six link I have not even found... the unique chest recipe I found last week, seriously this is hilarious!

GGG has to up the spawnrates of legendary beasts by at least 200%, after all we want to be able to experience this leagues content and not just read about it somewhere else.

Fun fact, I had three Lich already, probably 50 or more Breaches... content that should not even play a part at bestiary league.

I don't complain much about the boss fighting mechanics, but the chances to fighting them. Sustain my red map pool is a real pain in ass and spawning the "exclusive bosses" is much more painful. I leveled 2 characters to lvl.90 this league, only accessed 2 Bestiary bosses. I did red elder 3 times but never successfully spawn it to any T15 map.
I don't think people enjoy spending most of their game time to maintain their red map pools and sacrifice their hard earn currencies to push the red elder's influence. No one deserves to farm the unchallenging low-level contents all because of the insane RNG. Since more and more people quit this league early and more and more topics talk about the endgame problems, hope GGG reconsidering their endgame design.

+1