farming sulphate is aids

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ACGIFT wrote:

So it's not the LOOT being gated that's an issue. It's the GAMEPLAY being gated: you have players with tweaked-out builds decked in GG equips who are still stuck facing level 50 mobs in delves. It's just plain not fun.

This is the eternal PoE "problem" (more like design choice). All dressed up and no place to go. Even with mapping, players are not stopped by difficulty or lack of gear, they are stopped by maps not dropping. At red maps this could happen even when you roll correctly, because it's a highly RNG influenced thing.

Delve is more of the same in this regard: faceroll everything until you are stopped by the gating factor, which is not so much RNG this time, but tedium instead. In Delve you will sooner hit a point when the sulphate price is too prohibitive, than a point where the content becomes too difficult (either because of mobs or darkness). This is true even for SSF geared chars.

Now this problem has two ends: either content is too gated by RNG / boring shit, or gearing up your char is too easy. I'd say its a bit of both and both should be looked at.

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What's really bad about sulphate grind, is that is gating the whole league, not just part of it. For example, Breach lords were gated by a long grind too, but they were just the icing on the cake - the Breach league was accessible & integrated into every map.

Breach & Incursion felt more smoothly integrated into the natural progression. Delve feels like a separate thing, with an artifical access ticket you need to pay to get to. I'm perfectly fine with it being a separate ting, but something needs to be done about the boredom of the access ticket.

Reached maps now... and I see your point. ~40 Sulphate in a T2 map? that's barely enough for one level 60ish high-distance Delve.

Yes, I definitely see your point, Snorkle.

@Grepman, that was my approach as well a few days ago. but now I think the solution needs to be somewhere in the middle.
"free Delving" at the expense of the crown-jewel PoE end-game Maps isn't good, but Sulphate starvation isn't either, and it's frustrating players.

I've done blood aqueducts so much (speed mf clear) to get sulphite for delving i've made this many SSF tabulas from card drops LOLOLOL.

The Sulphite gate is cancer and I totally feel what OP is saying.

NICE Quarry/Blood Aqueducts spam to play DELVELEAGUE

I'd probably play the league longer if I was actually delving instead of spamming easymaps or zones for sulphite.

GGG as usual doesnt respect your time if you wanna play just the league mechanic, theres always some terrible excuse of a tedious grind in the way.

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ChristinaAnn wrote:

The Sulphite gate is cancer and I totally feel what OP is saying.

Wait, but OP says it is AIDS. Upgrade system that always keeps you azurite starved is cancer.

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morbo wrote:

All dressed up and no place to go.

That is actually very apt; I like it!

But yeah, I do agree: the big issue is that GGG is relying on content-gating to gate rewards, which... Definitely detracts from the fun.

And yes, the whole-game gating is definitely where Delve departs from pretty much all prior leagues: in every single league, while sure, you didn't get to ACCESS the crown jewel encounters/loot until very late, you at least got regular content. Just to go over a handful:

• 2.1.0/Talisman: Sure, you'd definitely not reach a Rigwald encounter until late game, but you got to try weird fights against augmented mobs and try out some cool talismans from Act 1 onward.
  
  
• 2.5.0/Breach: As you mentioned, there was hellacious grind to get to a single breachlord, but everywhere you went, you could still pop open a breach and get a rush of mobs thrown at you.
  
  
• 3.0.0/Harbinger: Sure, it took forever to get a beachhead map, but it was still interesting/fun to have harbingers toss whole packs of flaming mobs on you.
  
  
• 3.1.0/Abyss: Sure, high RNG kept those uniques far away, but every zone meant a new abyss to rush forth and combat monsters from.
  
  
• 3.3.0/Incursion: Even before you ever reach the temple, you get a dose of adrenaline with a short time-limit incursion.
  

By comparison, we have Delve, where we still have the gated major content, but instead in each zone, we have a deposit which you... Just click on once and walk past? There's no real gameplay content to that.

At least they could make delve progress shared. I believe i'll quit the league whenever my current character dies. I really enjoy the new content, but that's too painful, much much much more painful than just leveling the new character. Hell even if atlas progress and map items were character-bound it would be *less* painful than that. That's how bad it is.

@ChristinaAnn, lol those are some nice SSF tablas. Its both funny and depressing...

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ACGIFT wrote:

"

morbo wrote:

All dressed up and no place to go.

That is actually very apt; I like it!

Credit for the saying goes to Aim_Deep.

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btw, about the "Delve is so lucrative" argument. Is it really? I haven't found anything amazing so far, just a lot of vendor trash. Things that are standing out in my experience so far:

1.) Currency drops. At first glance. But playing low maps with IIQ gear will probably give you much more orbs.
2.) jewelry drops. Nice for unid chaos recipe and for vendor trash

Of course there are fossils and all that, but clearing all those niches also takes quite some time. I don't see Delve being more lucrative than zoom zooming through maps in IIQ/IIR gear.

Incursion & Abyss, for example, were showering us with much more loot. But maybe there are very good drops deeper in the mine? I dunno, becasue I'm staying at 90 - 120 level, that's my sweet spot in tedium vs fun.

The argument that Delve needs to be gated so badly because it's lucrative, really doesn't hold, imo.

I dont see the profit side either, I think people chaining burial with quant builds would laugh at the idea of switching to delve as a currency maker. Exp? I doubt it beats running the best shaped maps either. People dont chain guardian maps for xp, its all about finding the best shaped layout and even if that is a t12 then you chain that. T15 isnt necessarily better.


Heres the thing, we have gated content. We have


breach domains

atziri

uber atziri

council

guardians

shaper

elder

uber elder

uber lab

abyssal depths

unique maps


we already have heavily access gated content in the game, loads of it. Very few people pay for consistent access to this content. Essentially the only people who spend 100s of hours chaining this content and are willing to pay for it are either using it to grind to level 100 or using it to make a boatload of currency, and they are at the top of the trade pyramid where they can afford to chain this stuff.


For most people, even people with 10,000s of exalts worth of mirrored gear coming out of their ears, this content is not just chainable whenever where ever. 99.99...% of people cannot say hey, Im gonna go play breach domains 8 hours a day for the next month. When a league dies after 2 weeks and these people are bored to fuck of running the same old shit map system theyve been running for 5 years, this content does not turn them around and say hey, this is exciting, stick around and do this for the next 6 weeks.


We dont need more gated content, we need alternate endgame content. This stuff above doesnt count because we cant access it, we need stuff we can access.


So delve has too much xp to allow to be this? Well then change the amount of xp it gives, dont allow the monsters to go to 84, cap them at 79 and then just boost their stats as if they were getting higher, whatever needs done do it. Im not convinced it does give too much xp even in its current state, but regardless, if its stopping it being accessible then you fix it, you dont take away access.

Is it too rewarding? again, I believe it isnt, not by a long way. If the feeling is that it IS too rewarding though, then you change it, you take away some of the rewards, you dont keep them and then take away access, turning it into yet more content that exists, that the devs took time to make, that we PAID the devs to take the time to make, and that we cant access and hence offers no longevity to our game experience and we still stop playing poe super quick because theres nothing to do except map.

If its fine but its too disruptive early league because its progression is too fast compared to maps THEN FIX THAT, its not hard to think of ways to fix that aspect.



Its that simple, whatever is wrong with letting people have more greater access than they do now, fix it and let them have access. We need stuff we can do, for a long time, not more stuff we cant do. Im not gonna donate money to this game to pay the devs to make content Im not allowed to play.

The sad thing is you guys think that if they unlocked delve content it = good content.

However the mob difficulty stops at T16 map level, they do not infinitely gain HP/DMG or anything, just darkness gets worse = more farm and the delve runs get a few more affixes.

You will still one shot the screen, the 'tough' part is farming the yellow s**t then the blue s**t.

Try picking up sulphate in maps around tiwer 5 to 8 you get deposites that are worth 90 units. You'll be able to run pretty far in the delve from there.