Are you happy with the betrayal league so far?

Betrayal is absolutely disappointing.

Worst league of all time

- disappointing loot, prolonged useless battles for nothing (i.e. catarina fight)
- no balance, teleport one shot mess, very limited build capable (stats prove)
- crafting recipes egg hut is garbage

Wasn't sure I'd support any of this 3.5 mess but, ok GGG.

Worst league in entire Path of Exile history.

-Syndicate content is a joke in itself, mechanics are terrible, it's slow unrewarding as hell and painful to do, 10/10 would keep them locked in lab permanently.

-Bestiary is nothing but "extra map loot" with occasional semi-decent recipe, it's not CONTENT, it's just an small addon to what already exists.

-Incursion is god awful and painful to play, slow, unrewarding (literally boss at the end only has crap drops) and uninteresting whatsoever.


They nerfed Delve which was the most fun experience a player can have in this game. RIP PoE fun times

Not really able to appreciate it myself but it's far from "worst ever". Tempest was worse. Bestiary was worse.

One saving grace in this league is that you can park it and it doesn't affect your play, and re-start it whenever you feel like it. That alone makes it better than some of the leagues that literally ruined the rest of the game for me. I've gone a couple weeks without running the syndicate... trapping them in their lab. Only mildly annoying. I'll probably start them up again at some point.

I enjoy the new mechanic, and with all the other past league mechanics it's pretty fun. Maps have more possibilities for rewards now.

I dislike getting gibbed from off screen, and in general I though the syndicate wasn't that fun while leveling.
I also feel like I am not able to play enough for the large amount of content in the game. POE is an amazing game but it's a pretty large time sink to get the most out of it. Not sure if thats a gripe or not, lol.

My thoughts on the league are that it has a good idea, but the execution could be improved.

The Good
I absolutely love building the Syndicate, managing who goes where, what their relations are. I also like that all of the safehouses are different and there are pros/cons pending who you put where. It's also nice that the Syndicate gets more powerful when you level them up BUT their rewards also grow. The inter-division interactions feel cool and refreshing while also allowing players to optimize their encounters. if anything, I would like to see more of content like this.

The actual safehouses (when intel is 100%) feel really cool. Each has their own zone with mobs that while tanky are not insurmountable. Within the safehouse, the Syndicate members feel pretty balanced there when it's 4v1 or 5v1. It's fairly clear what is happening without the summoned monsters and you can interact with the members (take hits and deliver hits while avoiding one-shots). This part of the league feels good.

The voice acting of the Syndicate members is absolutely top notch. In particular, I love every line I've heard from It That Fled and Janus. I've specifically kept Janus while farming because I enjoy his voice lines so much. Hopefully we'll be able to hear more of them going forward.

I'm a big fan of GGG diversifying the endgame content. It seemed that Uber Lab was being forgotten as maps were taking center stage, but now you can achieve different end-games pending what you enjoy (farming syndicate/uber lab/ general mapping/Delve/farming breachstones). A diverse endgame is something I think PoE had struggled with prior to 3.0.

I also appreciate that GGG is trying to make crafting interesting by experimenting with players using Blessed Orbs/Divine Orbs/Exalted Orbs on gear via Leo. I also much prefer the method of fossil crafting to using Essences or chaos spamming. You can focus on the type of item you want to craft instead of throwing currency at the problem.

The Bad
That said, the only reason I like the Syndicate is that I've been farming area level 60-70 Syndicate because in maps it's just too much of a headache to deal with them. I really enjoy farming the Syndicate in low-level zones, but there's an obvious problem with the Syndicate difficulty. I've had a character that could clear red maps without issues, but it took a good 5 minutes and as many deaths to clear a Fortification encounter in a tier 2 map. The newest patch has done a lot to fix this, but they are still noticeably higher than the area they spawn in.

In addition, the rewards need to be reviewed. As it stands, the most lucrative rewards are either scarabs (Intervention) or Pure Breachstones/white sockets/flask quality (Research). And even between the two, Research is so much more lucrative that it's an open question if it's more efficient to farm solely Research instead of splitting Research & Intervention. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying interesting encounters like Guff should be removed. What I mean is that it shouldn't be so lopsided in terms of any one or two safehouses.

Adding on to the above, some Syndicate members fall very flat in terms of rewards. Like Vagan who drops relatively few rare items. He drops fewer items than most maps bosses in my experience. Ditto Aisling (though admittedly she was better before the nerf which IMO was undeserved). IMO each character should make you think "what is the best place I can put them" vs "is this character trash or not".

I've also noticed a distinct lack of a scarab for Alva, despite Einhar and Niko both getting scarabs. Given that Incursion is even more of a crapshoot this league than Incursion, I would have expected a way to counteract that. Especially since Incursions got hit pretty hard by the nerfbat this league. Instead of appearing every map, I see her once every 50 or so. Given the difficulty of getting high-tier rooms, I think her mechanic should be re-examined.

Adding onto Incursion, it still has a timer which I can't quite wrap my head around what it's supposed to do. If a build isn't able to run the timer up to where you have 30+ seconds left, Incursion as a whole gets skipped; there's no reason to risk it. And if a build is able to clear it with ease, the timer does absolutely nothing. It's a design choice that has me scratching my head.

Bestiary feels very tacked-on and honestly not a very good mechanic. The Blood Altar probably sounds great in meetings, but in execution it is very underwhelming and not very fun. If you killed the beasts, you shouldn't have to kill them again, let alone in a small stadium with effects going on left right and center. The beasts themselves are so spread out between maps that I don't think it's worth the hassle most of the time to find/search for them and hope it's something important. Some of the crafting effects are interesting, but on the whole, I don't see an incentive to pursue it and it's not explained within the game what goes where.


Other Notes

Fossils I feel are a terrific crafting tool, but I would love to see them expanded upon. Namely regal and/or exalt resonators instead of alt/alc/chaos resonators. I believe this league has shown pretty well that an exalt's primary value is as a currency and/or an input in crafting recipes, not as a crafting ingredient. Further, it nicely folds into the paradigm of working up a crafted item instead of trying to hit everything at once.

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The three biggest fixes I'd like to see:

1) Syndicate is re-balanced to be in-line with the area it's in
2) Syndicate rewards are more mixed up so more safehouses enter players' rotations; hopefully all 4 instead of just Research/Intervention ad nauseum
3) Syndicate rewards scale with area level and leader rank

Hell no.

Everything about the syndicate, besides getting to kill Vorici and the hilarious shit that It that Fled says, is godawful.

I despise everything about delves and then they made it even worse by hiding crafting recipes down in that shithole (so I'm missing a bunch of them because there's no way in hell I'm bothering with that shit)

I'm glad Bestiary mechanics are back but unless RNGesus is on your side you'll most likely never catch a beast that actually matters. Of course they didn't add the beast trading tons of people asked for yet their idiotic horde of worshippers constantly claim they listen to the community.

Didn't they nerf ES because they claimed it was too powerful? Yet now you can craft 400+ ES shields and 800+ ES armour pretty easily, they don't have a clue what they're doing.

They also need to fuck off with their constant spam advertising their grossly overpriced MTX.

I personally like this league. People can claim all they want that this is the worst league, but that is bs. The worst league was bestiary. How do I know? It was a league I could not bother myself to get past lvl 21 before quitting it.

Betrayal spike damage sucks, but the league as a whole is fun. Mastermind fight blows too, but that can just be skipped.

I have no opinion in betrayal lague since i'm a standard pleb. However, i like delve/incursion inclusion in 3.5

Quited league. Just cannot enjoy it at all.

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Molochmane wrote:

I have no opinion in betrayal lague since i'm a standard pleb. However, i like delve/incursion inclusion in 3.5

So am I thanks to Betrayl screw this league. And no I dont like inclusion of so much. Game should be more streamlined not 20 half ass leagues piled into one....all this crap to deal with and besides what if I dint like those league mechanics? We need league stones back then people can play as much or as least of those offerings. And all offerings. Invasion was my favorite league why cant I get that?