Really burned out bad challenges and the elder/shaper mini-game

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Perq wrote:

As far as I can tell this thread is not about complaining about challenges being challenging, but them being annoying instead of being challenging.

But that's what I'm talking about too. What challenging is in "kill 40 breachlords"? I can kill any breachlord any time, no problem here. I can do it 40 time in a row too. Only "challenge" I see there is to obtain 40 breachstones. Therefore, the real challenge is not to kill 40 breachlords, but to obtain ~256 chaos orbs (cheapest Tul's breachstone is 6,5 c worth) and spend aprox 2 hours to mindlesly and senslessly grind it, without any real profit. From my point of view - annoying torture. Same issue with "gain lvl 100". The real challenge is "find bunch of no-lifers and do poorjoy's/beachhead rotations for a few days" (you don't have to even touch any enemy) or "program the bot who will run your ele and phys reflect immune character on max T8 maps, while you sleep or sitting in work".

Besides, some "challenges" are simply stupid as hell. "Trigger 15 traps", what is that? When I build my character and during boss fighting I try to avoid traps or build char with good evasion skills. Why should I trigger some traps, when I'm designed to not do it. This is bad gameplay promotion.

Hey thanks everyone for the replies. Obviously all of my issues aren't shared by everyone, but it's nice to see I'm not alone on some of them.

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postrach_myszy wrote:

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Perq wrote:

As far as I can tell this thread is not about complaining about challenges being challenging, but them being annoying instead of being challenging.

But that's what I'm talking about too. What challenging is in "kill 40 breachlords"? I can kill any breachlord any time, no problem here. I can do it 40 time in a row too. Only "challenge" I see there is to obtain 40 breachstones. Therefore, the real challenge is not to kill 40 breachlords, but to obtain ~256 chaos orbs (cheapest Tul's breachstone is 6,5 c worth) and spend aprox 2 hours to mindlesly and senslessly grind it, without any real profit. From my point of view - annoying torture. Same issue with "gain lvl 100". The real challenge is "find bunch of no-lifers and do poorjoy's/beachhead rotations for a few days" (you don't have to even touch any enemy) or "program the bot who will run your ele and phys reflect immune character on max T8 maps, while you sleep or sitting in work".

Besides, some "challenges" are simply stupid as hell. "Trigger 15 traps", what is that? When I build my character and during boss fighting I try to avoid traps or build char with good evasion skills. Why should I trigger some traps, when I'm designed to not do it. This is bad gameplay promotion.

Gathering the breachstones via currency is something I enjoy doing. Trading is a big part of the appeal of POE to me in general as I love game economies. While I wish trade was better, I do consider gathering the wealth to complete or grouping with other people to rotate things like breachlords may not be a challenge, but it does give me a sense of accomplishment and even community. Grinds like that have actually made me a lot of friends that I would not have interacted with otherwise.

I've got mixed feelings on the challenges which require doing things during boss fights for the same reason. I build something that was reflect immune, someone sustaining (trap triggering for regen, etc) but I don't know if I can accomplish all of the things myself with this build.

Another challenge that I'm not sure of the wording on is the "Omnitech" challenge.
"Defeat the Vaal Omnitect while all of the Lightning Defenses in the room are active, without taking any Damage from them."

Does this have to be my temple? Can I go into a friends? Does no-one have to take damage or only me?

I have been a bit unlucky getting the level 3 lightning room, but the one test I did was my temple, friend comes in and kills the boss (I don't take any damage but I was outside the room). It didn't count, but I did technically "Defeat the Vaal Omnitect while all of the Lightning Defenses in the room are active, without taking any Damage from them." So I'd like to know ahead of time what's actually required before going into the lightning room on other temples, as for example, if it has to be "my" temple I likely wouldn't be able to swap characters for the boss as temples are character based.

I thought it was just me getting really annoyed. Maybe burned out? I'm actually comforted to see others feel the same.


And yes, the game has been sliding further and further into the abyss of non party friendly for awhile. Something that needs to be looked at.

I am probably going to make another post for this... but how the hell does the atlas even work.

Okay, so Elder influence on 14 maps.


I do Terrace which is shaper influenced and connected to the elder influenced arsenal.



And boom I lose half my elder influence.

Edit:
So yeah, shaper took over bog and because it was a single link it broke everything else. I did not know that mechanic as explained in the OP, I've been burning out super early since war of the atlas.
This is a perfect example of these mechanics that don't seem to have an explicit explanation in game that then cause frustration whether or not I want to do challenges, but now I went 7-9 maps that I could run to shift influence to... 3. It turns out that by paying MORE attention to micro-managing my atlas (what I dislike in the first place). I could have prevented it.

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RichMoney wrote:

So yeah, shaper took over bog and because it was a single link it broke everything else. I did not know that mechanic as explained in the OP, I've been burning out super early since war of the atlas.
This is a perfect example of these mechanics that don't seem to have an explicit explanation in game...

I had to learn this the hard way as well. When you're expanding your Elder blob, you need to protect key links with guard maps. Any Elder map that's directly connected to a Shaper-influenced map is at risk of being taken over by Shaper at any time. In this case, you should have taken Waste Pool to protect Bog, before extending your Elder blob downward. That way, Shaper has to take over Waste Pool before he can attack Bog, and in that case you can retake Waste Pool before he gets a chance to target Bog. While I have seen Shaper take over more than one Elder map at a time, he doesn't appear to be able to target Elder maps that are fully protected by guard maps.

When your Elder blob reaches 20 maps, Elder and his four Guardians will spawn and occupy five connected maps inside your blob. Elder/Guardian maps cannot be taken over by Shaper, and must remain connected to each other at all times. If you kill only 1-3 of the four Guardians, you may be able to create a long ring of maps that forms the sole connection between Elder and his remaining Guardians. In that case, all maps in the ring will be immune to takeover by Shaper, and they no longer need be protected by guard maps.

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RichMoney wrote:

Bestiary: Complete 1500 Maps affected by Elder or Shaper Influence, Zana Mods or a Sextant.

Practically speaking, this was only possible with a shaped atlas that allows for endless chaining of one map while being within permanent elder influence. Just getting to both of those conditions required a bit of prerequisite work. I think it took me a whole weekend to set up that perma elder ring for example. Stuff like that just seems incredibly silly to me but I still did it because I like leveling to 95.

But then there's other challenges that are quite interesting I find. A lot of these Encounters are quite neat (but may need to be better worded). So while triggering 15 traps challenge could be worded better, it's stuff like this that I feel are actual challenges. Last league had one challenge where you kill elder without Eldritch Decay dropping. I said to myself when I first read that, wtf does that even mean? and so here I am looking up the Elder fight and learning what edlrich decay even is.

Then another one of those challenges was to do the Pale Court without letting the tome spark. Well, wtf is a tome and how does it spark? Well here I am learning a little bit more about this game.

Kill Shaper with fifteen anomlies in the arena. Oh yeah that's right, those are the circle things I put in the corner of the arena.

Then there's "Complete the Bestiary" as a supposed challenge :(

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Perq wrote:

This + the fact they built this system so that you need specific maps. But at the same time we have this lovely thing going on:

Where do you get these specific maps?
Trade.
What they are refusing to fix?
Trade.

I wouldn't mind this element all that much if buying items like maps/currency/essences/whatever wasn't big waste of time and spam. :/

O please give me a break.

Trade is fine and the official site is great.

Use the official site for trade and if you are that impatient, you can use poe.trade for live search of whatever map you want and just message the person that just listed the map to ensure you get a response.

Complain about trade all you want, but if you refuse to use the tools available to you, then the problem is you, not the system.


As for OP's thing. I see your point, I feel like a lot of them are just designed to take a long time because they want players to play for longer then just one month. Ultimately, it would be better if they fixed itemization and drops in the game, rather then trying to extent playtime by some challenges that aren't necessarily the best.

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goetzjam wrote:

Trade is fine and the official site is great.

Buying maps via the official site has taken me 10-15 minutes for a single map.

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RichMoney wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

Trade is fine and the official site is great.

Buying maps via the official site has taken me 10-15 minutes for a single map.

For maps the live search option is the best. However, that being said I haven't had to buy any maps recently except some shaped maps and I always buy those in bulk and ignore the first few people (usually they dont have bulk anyway)

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goetzjam wrote:

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Perq wrote:

I wouldn't mind this element all that much if buying items like maps/currency/essences/whatever wasn't big waste of time and spam. :/

O please give me a break.

Trade is fine and the official site is great.

Use the official site for trade and if you are that impatient, you can use poe.trade for live search of whatever map you want and just message the person that just listed the map to ensure you get a response.

Complain about trade all you want, but if you refuse to use the tools available to you, then the problem is you, not the system.

As if I wasn't using the official tools? o_o I'm. What I'm saying is that using them is pointlessly confusing, spammy and otherwise annoying, especially how many maps you need to participate in the system.

The problem is the system, not me. And please, argue how this adds to the game/balance/whatever instead of trying to say I'm some sort of incompetent player (aka ad hominems).