Some final thoughts on bestiary

Since GGG probably is contemplating atm, how much of bestiary should go into the base game, i felt like giving some personal feedback might be appropriate.

Lets start with

What i like about bestiary:

The beastcrafting has some very nice stuff in it. The recipes for leveling are great as well as some endgame ones (add/remove affix, eternal a magic item, split mods). These are very useful and deserve to be kept imo.

I also like the attempt to slow down the game a bit, but a better overall balance of the beastfights would be desireable. During the leveling phase they are still overtuned, wheras in maps it's that mixed experience wich is quite typical for PoE: most of the time the fights are rather easy until the circumstances (mapmods, monstertype, monsteraffixes etc.) make them spiky. I understand though, that it's rather difficult to balance these encounters for maps due to all the vast differences in the builds and characters out there.

What i dislike:

Since you've already heard more than enough of this i try to make the list short without long explanations.

- Nets still annoy me.
- The UI. (To much useless clutter and to little useful information).
- The way beasttrading was implemented.
- The hustle with managing the menagerie.

All in all i feel the lesson GGG should learn from Bestiary is, that they should think a bit more about how the players will interact with the new content in practical gameplay and how they could make this interaction feel good, in other words not confusing (bestiary ui) or annoying (nets, menagerie, trade implementation). More QoL is needed and less clutter.

Ty for reading. (Posted this on reddit too, to maximize my chances, that somebody actually reads it.)

If bestiary makes it to standard, please transfer ALL our bestiary progress there, i cant go through the nightmare of capturing everything all over again.

I guess adding the content to the game wouldn't hurt that much from my POV, if:

1. Net mechanic is replaced by something enjoyable, e.g. "mark this beast" instead of "mark this beast and finish it in 3 seconds or wait another 20 seconds and try again". Then be able to tell the NPC that you are in a "dont-care" mode, so that you just capture everything you kill.
2. Beast type information is shown with hover on alt. E.g. the player should know if this IS the Fenumal Hybrid Arachnid, so that they can sell it once the "Complete the Bestiary" achievement comes around.
3. Menagerie state information is shown on recipes. E.g. you will be consuming one out of total n beasts of this type. So that we know we aren't wasting something precious.
4. A way of hiding and sorting recipes is devised. So that the playerbase doesn't need to type search for a recipe every time they just completed it.
5. Design several beastcrafting altar arenas, so that characters that cant fight in a 1 meter circle can also do the recipes.
6. Remove life regen from beasts (same should be done with essence monsters), this only adds frustration.
7. Remove NPC voice acting or make it more varied. Nobody wants to listen to the same line over and over and over and over again.

I would also prefer if the content is introduced to the game in a more reduced manner. Encountering beasts should feel like encountering breaches and abyssses ("hey, nice, a beast"). It should not feel like "capture 50 pointless types of beasts without an apparent reason".

As the content stands, I don't bother capturing rare beasts, and I don't bother with recipes at all. The frustration factor is just too high.