Incursion / Temple review 3.12 (updated to 3.13)

Summary:

temple is not worth running 'regularly'. Recent changes to make temple 'great again' were a flop that changed nothing. It is nice leveling tool but from what I hear Heists give even more easy xp so that point is moot.

Rewards? there are 2: corruption chamber and sacrificial chamber. everything else is garbage. If you are in there for profit - just do something else.

like seriously - 'efficiency aware' players should 100% skip this content, there is no reason to run it.


Background:

Ive leveled 70- ~92 using 4maps+temple rythm pretty much exclusively. Used map only temples with t14+ being the majority. roughly 25 temples.

I prioritised corruption, sacrificial and +1 rooms. everything else is a filler anyway.
2 corruption chambers (one double corrupt, one poof) and two sacrifical chambers (2 cowards legacy). 5 vials, no good temple exclusive drops.


Non-S tier rooms are all C-tier rooms: temple-exclusive items drop like candy from non-temple sources, vault room is nothing but a bunch of pre-rolled arcanist boxes weighted to drop junk, same with various storage/warehouse and whatnot rooms. they all drop junk.

Recent changes to temple were a solid miss. Entire league mechanic right now got reduced to:
- delirium boost (an amazing one but still)
- leveling experience if one plays standard or doesnt like/cannot play (crashes) Heist
- gambling for 2 good rewards (that are a gamble in itself)

temple-only items/affixes are good, but slowly being power creeped by influenced affixes (and you have to roll them still). what is even worse - these items drop in bulk from 'current league' mechanic making temple the worst method of acquiring temple items.. wtf is that?


other than 2 rewards and sea of junk items there is nothing there. As sad as I would be - it is time for Alva to go. you can easily cram double corrupt into some rare drop orb and call it a day. it had been 'buffed' into mediocrity and it made itself at home there.

solutions:
- make the room rng less stacked or even make double corrupt attempt (with lower chance of success) a guaranteed 81+ temple feature. seriously, this is the only reason to run temple nowadays (double corrupt gems drop like candy from other sources, noone cares)
- temple items drop smartly rolled (like talismans did for some time, they were stealth nerfed back, sadly)
- make temple account-wide, not character-wide. i see no reason why it still is per-character.
- make temple drop other special types of loot. currently new leagues drop 'old' leagues stuff but not vice versa. for new players there is no difference between new and old. make temple drop scarabs, fossils and other stuff - because why the hell not. noone complains that legion drops everything.


other than that - it is just easier to remove it, keep the double corrupt and maybe few interesting uniques (mask of the demon singlehelmetly keeps thousands of AG's alive). as a content, one of 4 major masters - it is pointless except for players like me who simply run it because of being too lazy to roll maps

Agree with all of this. And since you're sitting out Heist league I can confirm that the experience in Heists is VERY good; I got a dedicated Heist gladiator, literally has never run a single map, that got to lvl 93 before his first skill gems hit lvl 20.

Anyway, a short list of my chief issues with Incursion as it currently exists in the game:

1 - The rewards are terrible. For the time and RNG needed to upgrade the "good" rooms, nearly all of the T3 rewards are still absolute garbage. T3 map room, jewelry room, weapon room, and armor room are especially bad, and it's not like it would even be that hard to fix: for the map room, stop ignoring watchstones and kick out some T14+ maps for a change. For the rest, add some influenced items to the pool. Literally nobody cares about a rare belt with an architect mod, but a rare ELDER belt with an architect mod? Now we're getting somewhere.

2 - The rooms collectively have little to no impact on the rest of the temple. Very rare exceptions exist, such as the Corruption Altar, but that should be the standard. Upgrading a currency room increases currency drops from every enemy in the entire temple, but also causes those enemies to deal extra elemental damage. Max out the trap room? Two reward chests per room are lucky. Max out the Healing Pools? Architects always drop an extra rare item with 2 guaranteed Life tagged affixes. And so on. Make the rooms actually have a direct impact on both Risk and Reward for the entire temple, Omnitect included. And speaking of which...

3 - The Omnitect is just bad content. It's laughably easy, it takes far too long due to an unskippable invulnerable/minion phase, the drops are bad, and 99% of the time the fight is completely unaffected by any choices you made during the construction of the temple. Every single room type needs to have some impact on this boss, either in terms of its stats/attacks or its rewards (ideally, both, but at this point I'd take anything). It's the boss of a modular choose-your-own-adventure story; those choices you made need to matter in some way. The current Omnitect is the Mass Effect 3 of this game: you make all these choices and none of them matter, now we're gonna waste a minute of your life forcing you to watch something boring when you'd rather be playing a game.

4 - Lack of player agency. When Alva starts the temple with a Corruption Altar, and then never once in the next 11 incursions gives you the option to upgrade it, it feels like you were punished for doing nothing wrong. There are literally dozens of solutions to this problem, so many that it's not even worth going into here; suffice it to say that out of every single option available re: Choosing Rooms And Upgrades, GGG went with the absolute worst one: zero agency whatsoever.

5 - Lack of access to newer content. Sid hit this one on the head: Incursion is at a pretty huge disadvantage compared to other league mechanics like Heist/Legion/Blight/Metamorph/Delirium when it can't drop fossils, breachstones, delirium orbs, etc. Of course, this can be remedied by adding new rooms to the Temple, but if those rooms don't fix the Time/Risk/Reward imbalance issue I outlined in Problem 1 all you've done is make Problem 4 even worse.

6 - I hate the Vaal tileset. This is obviously subjective as Hell, but I think it's worth noting that I really, really hate everything about Atzoatl as a map: I hate the tiny ledges that your character always wants to get stuck on, I hate how everything is the same murky maroon color. If the different rooms had a larger variety of aesthetics in their design, running Atzoatl would feel less soul-draining.

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sidtherat wrote:

(like talismans did for some time, they were stealth nerfed back, sadly)

They were? That sucks big time...

Generally agree though, it's way too annoying/hard to get the awesome things temple has to offer, too much RNG

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sidtherat wrote:

(mask of the demon singlehelmetly keeps thousands of AG's alive)

Pretty offtopic but how does that work? Never used AG before, what stats make this item so valuable to AGs?

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Wissle wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

(mask of the demon singlehelmetly keeps thousands of AG's alive)

Pretty offtopic but how does that work? Never used AG before, what stats make this item so valuable to AGs?

"Regenerate 1% of Life per second per 500 Maximum Energy Shield"

say your AG has 50kHP (it has more, but to simplify)

you give it a chest with 'gain 10% life as extra ES'. your AG now has 5kES+.

so it regens 10% of Life per second - 5kHP/s before ANY other minion regen

AG with these two items is nigh unkillable and ofc you can boost it much, much further (but from my experience - not needed. make sure it has chaos res capped)

"

sidtherat wrote:

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Wissle wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

(mask of the demon singlehelmetly keeps thousands of AG's alive)

Pretty offtopic but how does that work? Never used AG before, what stats make this item so valuable to AGs?

"Regenerate 1% of Life per second per 500 Maximum Energy Shield"

say your AG has 50kHP (it has more, but to simplify)

you give it a chest with 'gain 10% life as extra ES'. your AG now has 5kES+.

so it regens 10% of Life per second - 5kHP/s before ANY other minion regen

AG with these two items is nigh unkillable and ofc you can boost it much, much further (but from my experience - not needed. make sure it has chaos res capped)

I see, thanks!

More solutions:
- Add a new Betrayal syndicate member for the purposes of having Incursion-related loot and scarabs. The scarabs would allow players to more efficiently farm the temple to try and get more T3 corruption and sacrifice rooms.

- Make the map room actually drop maps relative to the temple's level. If you run a level 81 temple, you should be getting T14+ maps. Additionally, the map room should drop more maps. Delve makes a laughing stock out of it.

I agree.

It is very nice that PoE has multiple things to do in end game. Unfortunately some things seem to have fallen behind with the rest of the game.

Make incursion and betrayal a bit more rewarding.
Double the amount of sulfur you get from niko in maps.

They need to stop nerfing loot from leagues.

Simple as that.

Torment is also really bad designed, they should make map unique bosses to be already possessed and not just wander around the map. This already is in the game with tormented cells T2 on incursion so it's already in game and CAN be implemented.

Talisman is still vendor food despite the anointments from blight. I don't see any solution for this.. it's a bad league because how the corruption system works in this game.

Prophecy another failure.. 99% of the prophecies are absolute worthless because most of the uniques are garbage or the decent prophecies are so damn rare it's just another false sense of getting more loot.

Syndicate more RNG but worse it messes with crafting probably the WORST part of playing a new league every single league.. the RNG tied with the special crafts and the incredible lack of actual specific syndicate members veils on current league mechanics. Not only that but the fact that fightning catarina destroys the entire board makes it much much worse, it's almost NEVER worth it to fight her if you want certain things from certain members.

Incursion another RNG fest.. the rooms a joke you either never get the only useful ones or you get tier 2 and RNG fucks you over, bad luck try again in who knows how many temples. Some of the loot there is obsolete and of course the rare and interesting almost NEVER drops. The entire vial system needs to be better it needs to change, uniques almost never drops either from there except on the apex.
And for the love of all the ARPGs fix the damn T3 map room according to the damn watcherstones.

Legion overly nerfed. War hoards are barely giving sometimes 2-4 splinters. Bosses STILL bug out as well even after several fixes.

Blight also got nerfed too but the TONS of bugs are still there present even to this patch, monsters literally ignoring the lane and just rushing to the pump or just targetting the exile it also happens with bosses too so it's not only bugged but it also got nerfed hard drop rate wise (and I'm talking about map encounter here, not blighted map.. don't get me started on how rare the blight uniques are for whatever reason)

Metamorph, meh.. still there most of the time when you get all the organs you get a couple pennies for 10-30 seconds of your time usually it's nothing unless of course RNG is with you.

This isnt about only incursion for me at least. They need to stop overnerfing the "core" leagues and moving all the loot to the current one.

Sure, there will be people so happy with the current state of the "core" leagues it's your opinion but this is mine.

Your perspective is one from a trader... that's fine. But SSF play is out there too. Temple is probably the best way to get free maps. Zana is good too.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Your perspective is one from a trader...

nice guess. wrong guess

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that's fine. But SSF play is out there too.

self gimp mode that GGG repeatedly told us is not a basis for balance

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Temple is probably the best way to get free maps.

have you played this game? what maps? t3 temple map room drops jack sh.. for maps: all over the level spectrum, junk maps.

league content does not respect watchstones, you get base-level maps. this has been so since last atlas 'rework'

i hope you actually have played and tested incursion content in current patch before that comment. if not - please try before commenting.

Incursion DOES NOT drop maps better than any other content, nor you need maps in current game btw