I am a talker, yes.
As far as the overwhelming nature of the game goes, I don't dispute that or that suggest in any way that it'll magically disappear with some golden implementation of Betrayal (or its wholesale removal from future leagues - we've gotten confirmation on Jun as a master but how that actually lands is still unknown); it's one of the things I love about PoE. My concern is with Betrayal as it stands competing for headspace with whatever the new league mechanics wind up being based on its complexity. Going off the cadence of permanent master introductions present now (Einhar in Act 2, Niko in Act 4, Alva in Act 5) and the location of the vault itself in Act 9 I'd hazard a guess that we're going to be meeting Jun for the first time in Act 9 in or just outside Highgate, with a couple of zones between there and the Oasis for the introduction of the Syndicate mechanics before the training wheels come off. This puts Harbor Bridge off the table even if nothing else is changed, which (combined with Syndicate events no longer being guaranteed in every zone/map further blunts the easy reward loop and should go a good ways toward getting players to at least notice the mechanics of whatever league comes next.
Scarabs are fine more or less as is; even the Gilded Scarabs don't offer guarantees on maximised returns for what are currently the most lucrative options (like Sulphite) and I'd anticipate at least some shift in value there towards the surer bets no matter what.
As for Pure Breachstones being the One True Path to 100 now... yeah. They are. Even for people who play solo, once they're up into the low 90's if they can manage to clear a PB deathless that's going to do more for them than days of grinding at any point in the game's past. I don't really think it should be central to the arguments around Betrayal though; hitting level 100 has been less special for a while now, and if you're still waiting on anything in the passive tree to get your build humming by the time you've broken 90 ten more points probably aren't gonna save you. General reward access and the nature of those rewards seems like a decent target for discussion but the stones themselves are more distracting than anything.
Lastly - for now, would love to keep this running - I wasn't shooting for some perfect solution. I wanted to toss something out there and get some holes blown in it to see what other players saw as the core value of the league most worth retaining.
(And Veiled mods are great. Soft corruptions that can be backed out of definitely have their place in the game
Focus, too. It's the opportunity cost panic button Vaal skills used to be but -potentially - so much better.)
