Decay feels like an arbitrary punishment rather than a threat you can outplay

From my understanding, the design idea behind decay is an ever present threat that you have to stay ahead of in order to get memories/rewards.
Kind of like Indiana Jones outrunning a giant boulder.
In my experience playing, this is not how it feels.
Instead decay comes in 2 flavours;
1) The decay is barely noticeable, doesn't really impede your progress and might as well not even be there.
2)Decay completely blocks your path or boots you out the very moment you touch it.

At times it also feels completely random how much contact with decay it takes to remove you from a memory or teleport you to a stabilizer.
In some memories, especially when trying to leave a memory you chose not to complete, finding a large enough pool to get deep enough into to leave can be difficult.
At other times it feels like you barely touched it before you're booted out.

A couple of things really exacerbate this, layouts and slow effect.
The layouts is an issue with terrible to run tile sets (like dungeon) with lots of tiny corridors and lots of doors, where the decay can simply be in the wrong place and leave you no path around.
The slowing effect (an already oppressive game mechanic in all forms it exists in) makes a bad situation worse, because if you have to dip into decay slightly to try and get around an obstacle, you're slowed so much it becomes especially difficult to get back out.

I understand that there has to be some sort of threat or opportunity cost in order to acquire memory fragments, given that you use them to get rewards, but the current implementation just feels bad to play.
A number of times I've felt scammed out of a memory because the decay spawns in a bad place on a bad tile set and there isn't a path I can reasonably get to.

tl;dr slow effects are always annoying, combined with difficult to navigate tile sets with paths blocked by decay that may or may not instantly teleport you out as soon as you brush it.

Edit: thought I should also try and offer solutions instead of just moaning.
Remove the slow effect from the decay, at least then if you are forced into it to navigate you have a better chance of making it out.
Make killing mobs within the memory slow the rate of decay, or even push it back slightly.

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Instead decay comes in 2 flavours;
1) The decay is barely noticeable, doesn't really impede your progress and might as well not even be there.
2)Decay completely blocks your path or boots you out the very moment you touch it.

This is like that for a reason. It's not so much the presence of decay, but if it has a light blue outline that is spreading out. If you see decay with light blue growing out of it, run from it. If you see a dark blue outline, then it's a part of the map that's going to decay at a later time and is safe to travel past to look for stabilizers and memory rewards.

If decay completely blocks your path and it immediately boots you, it was probably not the path you were supposed to go on to begin with. You basically have to look at where the light blue decay is growing and use that as a guideline of where your goal is going to be. It takes some practice and understanding but it is possible to eventually learn how the decay works and to use its behavior to minimize how often you get engulfed by it.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

If decay completely blocks your path and it immediately boots you, it was probably not the path you were supposed to go on to begin with. You basically have to look at where the light blue decay is growing and use that as a guideline of where your goal is going to be. It takes some practice and understanding but it is possible to eventually learn how the decay works and to use its behavior to minimize how often you get engulfed by it.

I know about using the movement of the decay to predict roughly where will decay first and try to evade it, but on some areas the path the game decides is safe and should be taken doesn't line up with the path you can actually traverse due to corridors and doorways.

My personal problem with the decay is, when you "win" its like meh. What did you even gain again? E.g. in an incursion there is a feeling of changing something possibly important, and there is enjoyment of having downed something in a limited amount of time.

But when you lose it always feels like bullshit. Because really who can't run to the stabilizer if its not some stupid maze layout with retarded decay pathing?

Trainwreck design in yet another league.

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Frostride wrote:

My personal problem with the decay is, when you "win" its like meh. What did you even gain again? E.g. in an incursion there is a feeling of changing something possibly important, and there is enjoyment of having downed something in a limited amount of time.

But when you lose it always feels like bullshit. Because really who can't run to the stabilizer if its not some stupid maze layout with retarded decay pathing?

Trainwreck design in yet another league.

this is why i got to 12 challenges and said i was done with league.

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Frostride wrote:

My personal problem with the decay is, when you "win" its like meh. What did you even gain again? E.g. in an incursion there is a feeling of changing something possibly important, and there is enjoyment of having downed something in a limited amount of time.

But when you lose it always feels like bullshit. Because really who can't run to the stabilizer if its not some stupid maze layout with retarded decay pathing?

Yes. This is exactly how it feels.
I really think a timer would be more interesting.

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Pyriell wrote:

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

If decay completely blocks your path and it immediately boots you, it was probably not the path you were supposed to go on to begin with. You basically have to look at where the light blue decay is growing and use that as a guideline of where your goal is going to be. It takes some practice and understanding but it is possible to eventually learn how the decay works and to use its behavior to minimize how often you get engulfed by it.

I know about using the movement of the decay to predict roughly where will decay first and try to evade it, but on some areas the path the game decides is safe and should be taken doesn't line up with the path you can actually traverse due to corridors and doorways.

That's why you have to be aware of obstacles being in your way but the idea is still the same: if there is a growing decay in your way, don't go that way, find a way that isn't decaying even if it doesn't seem to make sense. I still find it very rare that I would need to move past an actively decaying part of the decay rather than find a way around.

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nadakuu wrote:

this is why i got to 12 challenges and said i was done with league.

I feel you brother (or sister) :)

Same train of thought here, the mere idea that I would have to almost exclusively engage with the Nexus for another 12 challenges was so depressing I just walked right off the plank the moment I hit 12.

Synthesis tries to mix two themes that have nothing in common. On one hand you have the concept of entropy/restoring order from disorder (memory loss and decay) and on the other yet another crafting mechanic which potentially can create stupidly overpowered items. Where do these things connect? Nowhere, just another league with clunky mechanics as an excuse to shoehorn more crafting into the game. Even after 3.6.3 you have to collect/check silly amounts of gear to get anything out of synthesizing. And it's great that Octavian really likes the mechanic, but he represents 0,1% of the playerbase at best.

If you desperately want to introduce more crafting, make it a full-on theme once and then be done with it for at least a year. Don't attach crafting to every single league from now on. The way it is now makes no sense and destroys any remnants of believability the game had left. I could accept that the Forsaken Masters each supplied me with a crafting bench and offered me some recipes that fit their character. But I mentally check out when you tell me that fighting random monsters in a cage somehow conjures up any item. Or that a machine in a very tackily decorated room that only Melania Trump could love (I'm sure you could fit in some more gold accents) makes super-powerful items while you're literally surrounded by decay 10 feet away.

Have some goddamn respect for your own creation! At this point all you can tell someone who never played PoE is that it works, sort of. There is no proper worldbuilding, there is no storytelling to speak of, there is no atmosphere, there is no consequence to any of your actions, there are no moral choices, there is no sense of cataclysmic events about to happen. All that's left is a game that works purely on a mechanical level. Instead of Wraeclast it could literally take place anywhere else, it wouldn't make a lick of a difference by now.

I'm sorry for going on a tangent here but with every league I see this game scattering even more while loosing a bit of integrity in the process and soon PoE will only be the game "where you go really fast and kill stuff on the go". I started playing in 2013 because the setting was appealing and the way skills worked seemed interesting, not because I could explode whole screens of mobs at a time. I know I can't do anything about it except waiting or quitting but it's still sad to see a game slowly getting completely drained of any identity it once had and replacing it with meaningless minigames.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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Pyriell wrote:

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

If decay completely blocks your path and it immediately boots you, it was probably not the path you were supposed to go on to begin with. You basically have to look at where the light blue decay is growing and use that as a guideline of where your goal is going to be. It takes some practice and understanding but it is possible to eventually learn how the decay works and to use its behavior to minimize how often you get engulfed by it.

I know about using the movement of the decay to predict roughly where will decay first and try to evade it, but on some areas the path the game decides is safe and should be taken doesn't line up with the path you can actually traverse due to corridors and doorways.

That's why you have to be aware of obstacles being in your way but the idea is still the same: if there is a growing decay in your way, don't go that way, find a way that isn't decaying even if it doesn't seem to make sense. I still find it very rare that I would need to move past an actively decaying part of the decay rather than find a way around.

I appreciate what you're saying.
I have still felt scammed by decay, whether there is some subtle clue or not that there's a path I should have gone down instead, it still felt annoying to lose a potential new or a placed memory.

One area where this is a real issue is in placed memories within the nexus.
Lets say you're using a + shaped memory, entering from the bottom and intending to go to the right arm to place your next memory and move towards whatever you're going for.
The game decides "safe path, left/top" and immediately consumes the right hand side with decay.
You now either simply abandon that memory, try to get to the right somehow and most likely fail, or follow the path the game wants you to go and end up somewhere you don't want to be.

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One area where this is a real issue is in placed memories within the nexus.
Lets say you're using a + shaped memory, entering from the bottom and intending to go to the right arm to place your next memory and move towards whatever you're going for.
The game decides "safe path, left/top" and immediately consumes the right hand side with decay.
You now either simply abandon that memory, try to get to the right somehow and most likely fail, or follow the path the game wants you to go and end up somewhere you don't want to be.

I don't usually get this problem because I will have my memory placed where I need it already most of the time, but if I do need to dynamically change memory pathing as I go, I find it easiest to teleport to the nexus first and then make changes from there before I start any decays.