Development Manifesto: Legion as a Core Game Mechanic

cant wait for the Head Hunter removal announcement

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illleech wrote:

Guys... Devs...

I believe you've read it like 123213123 times already but this league was not good at all in terms of balance and further development of the Game.

The only builds that are viable (not good, exactly viable) for Legion content are those that can clear screen with 2-3 actions.
With such leagues a player will not even want to try some new and/or cool builds because the player will simply have to skip content that You have been working on, no doubt, so hard.

Best wishes and no offence.

Players informed GGG of this huge problem last league too.

And the league before that.

And the league before that.

Chris thinks "fast = good," but nothing I've ever heard him say on the subject indicates that he realizes that League mechanics which change the above equation to "fast = viable" limit player choice by an absurd degree and (practically speaking) kill the choice aspect of this ARPG outright.

I look forward to this new content :)

Thank You GGG, I enjoyed the past couple of months very much.

Balancing Skill Gems could use a little work though.

Thanks Again!

100 breach splinters = 1 breachstone , 1x xoph/tul/esh breachstone = 1-4c

20 portal scroll = 1c , 100 portal scroll = 5c / drops every map


breach=low chance to spawn , drops fucking nothing , even if you find a chayula breach which is even rare, u will probably drop nothing anyway


well , according to my calculation is better to pick up and sell portals scrolls to buy an entire breachstone than picking up splinters , just waste of time to run breaches , drops = nothing and picking up 100 splinter is a big waste of time as well , i just need to run 10x breach incubators and drop a whole breachstone if i want a breachstone

by the way , 40/40 done , hundreds of hours played this league , only picked up chayula splinters and got only 61 , the monolith will be already 1/10th chance to appear , this is a complete nonsense nerf

Where the poe is heading?
i'm pretty sure legion league is HUGE back step from "progression" in the sense of gameplay.

This league's contents you can't even enjoy without picking "certain" build and skill. This has been an issue for several leagues but on legion takes the very special top.
And does even devs knows about how to spell balance? or what does it means?
This game is getting very unfriendly to new users or even existing light users (like me) and honestly, I'm keep losing my hopes and joynees from this game.

Adding this does nothing to benefit the game but make it more convoluted, hard to learn for new players, floods the market and a host of other things. Not to mention its not a fun or engaging mechanic. Literally just "click stone, then kill". Just floods the game with fluff.

Not a fun mechanic either. I wont even touch the stone in tier 5+ unless i have over 6500+ life and am level 90+. Any monolith rare with a bow is basically an instagib rifle.

Alright. I'm just gonna be blunt about it. As someone who played this league for like a day and said 'Huh. This is literally just timed runs the league v3.0. Ya, no. I'm just gonna take this league off.' the fact that this league is going core is troubling.

I get it, the hyper-clear hyper-meta is super popular among the most elite few percent of your players, the streamers, the racers, the power traders, and the like. But you've made an incredibly diverse set of skills, tons of build-enabling uniques, and complex customization that takes a combination of madness and brilliance to fathom the true depths of... And then you invalidate like 90% of it.

What is the point of that? IMHO it feels like y'all are kinda in a design rut with this hyper-clear hyper-meta, I mean just look at the mechanics for the last ten leagues.

Breach - Interact to create an expanding area with special monsters which closes on a timer that is extended if you kill them fast enough.

Legacy - Equip up to three past leagues effects to your character that alter the next few zones you enter.

Harbringer - Spawn mid-bosses in all areas that drop powerful and useful crafting currency.

Abyss - Interact to create a rift that spawns special monsters, follow it as it moves through the zone and kill them as fast as possible or it will close. Rarely spawns a side area with more stuff (that doesn't close on a timer)

Bestiary - Beasts spawn in all zones, hunt the rare ones and sacrifice them to craft items and currency. Hunt unique beasts to be able to craft special mods and earn unique items.

Incursion - Interact with incursions to the past to shape the temple in the future. Incursions to the past close on their own if you don't kill the enemies within fast enough, denying the ability to shape the temple.

Delve - Gather sulphite in all areas to light up the mines, allowing you to explore their depths for great riches and dangers. Be quick about it, as in soviet wraeclast light escorts you.

Betrayal - Hunt and manipulate the immortal syndicate to find their stronghold and assault it, plundering their vast riches.

Synthesis - Create a path out of memories that collapse on their own as you attempt to collect them to seek great treasures in the deepest recesses of the mind. Craft these together for even greater rewards.

Legion - Interact with a monolith to create a rift in time, kill the enemies in the rift to free them, but be quick about it as they disappear quickly, then kill them again for their riches. Collect emblems to enter the Domain of Timeless Conflict and slaughter the armies on a timer for greater rewards.

So of the last ten leagues, five of them are definitely hyper-clear hyper-meta leagues. Breach, Abyss, Incursion, Synthesis, and Legion. Whether Delve counts is debatable, I say it doesn't, but I can see the rationale.

The hyper-clear hyper meta leagues all have the same basic mechanic. Interact with a thing, don't run out of time before you complete an objective. Usually the objective is kill all the things, although Synthesis mixed it up with a focus on mobility, and Incursion had multiple objectives and only one timer for them.

And they all have the same flaw because of it. If you're not instantly exploding the entire screen, you run out of time. And if you need to instantly explode the entire screen, then you have only a handful of skills that can reasonably do that. Plus you need to invest extremely heavily in DPS/AoE (Damage over Area, not Damage or Area, as single target is...really only ok for Flicker Strike) rather than defenses, which limits your ways to handle enemies down to don't get hit and kill everything before you run out of life.

So unpopular opinion time, the hyper-clear hyper-meta is one of the two major limitations keeping this game from being as close to an ideal ARPG as is possible. Yes, it needs to exist, because there are those players that love it and that's fine, y'all do you. But for the game to continue growing in complexity and creativity, it needs to no longer be mandatory.

Qarl, which challenge did you complete? Just curious since you only got one this league.

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Kalika_Hadake wrote:

Alright. I'm just gonna be blunt about it. As someone who played this league for like a day and said 'Huh. This is literally just timed runs the league v3.0. Ya, no. I'm just gonna take this league off.' the fact that this league is going core is troubling.

Then this means you never really got to experience what it was like... Which means that you don't realize that you've barely grazed the tip of the iceberg. The reality is so much more worse than you rant about.

The tl;dr of it is that it's not just hyper-clear, but done in a way that ONLY one build really does it well. This is why Legion had all of 3 viable builds:

• Cyclone. Using Headhunter, 2-3 IL, and self-tempchains; nothing could compare to how well it cleared the Domain of Timeless Conflict, a zone where your reward (EXP and loot) scaled directly with how quickly you could clear, with no real upper limit. (breachstones, at least, always took a fixed 2 minutes...)
  
• Essence Drain+Contagion. Nothing else could one-shot entire monoliths so readily. These guys spent all their time farming Glacier maps, since a T2 map gives basically the same legion rewards as a T16.
  
• Tornado Shot. Using standard MF gear, and always with an aurabot; it could still handle monoliths, just slower than ED. Basically a gamble that what you gave up in monoliths-per-hour you made up for in card drops.

Also, you wouldn't have seen that Legion's rewards were basically every other league's rewards, but richer, meaning there was zero point to do most other things; enhanced breachstones, Incursion-modded items, fossils, high-iLvl elder/shaper items, and the like just rained from the sky.

So yeah, you don't even know the half of it... And you're probably that much better off for it.

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Phaeded wrote:

Qarl, which challenge did you complete? Just curious since you only got one this league.

That really IS the source of one of our problems; basically no one at GGG really knows what their game feels like anymore. Someone claiming "I'm too busy making a product to try it out" is the mark of a poor programmer/developer.