Fun league. My first 40/40; my first level 100. Possible improvements to pain points within.

As I've clearly played quite a bit this league, thought it fitting to let GGG know my thoughts. Overall, POE continues to be a fun game, and Ultimatum has been a fun league.

Background
It should probably be noted I played less than half the duration of Ritual League, and POE is often an on-and-off game for me. Lots of leagues I completely or nearly completely skipped - Harbinger, Bestiary, Betrayal, Heist were ones where I didn't play the league beyond maybe starting a character, for various reasons.

The fact that I didn't play "much" during Ritual league probably greatly increased the enjoyment I had from Ultimatum due simply to the fact that I was able to more fully exploit the Echoes of the Atlas expansion. In the same vein, in the past I had always been a "casual" player, content to do scrublord strategies like chaos recipe for the entire league, never being able or willing to really push endgame content like Shaper, Sirus, etc. So, please let it be known that this post may not be saying "Ultimatum is intrinsically super fun" as much as it is saying "Experiencing top-level endgame for the first time was super fun, and Ultimatum only added to the experience."

Also, I often play in Standard and usually consider it my home league, which may colour some things in a different light (e.g. I never get the feeling of "ugh, I have to unveil these benchcrafts AGAIN?" because anytime I get feelings like that, I literally just log back in to Standard and I have all my progress saved).

Stuff I liked

• Inscribed Ultimatums. I love them and they're an absolute perfect risk/reward design for me. I already posted about it, so I won't repeat myself too much here.
• Ruin's design was nearly perfect. I can't really imagine how it could have been improved, other than somehow making it more clear that Restless Ground III adds Ruin when I and II don't. It's really confusing to me how so many players miss the massive neon glowing debuff sign above their character, plus the debuff icon in upper left, plus the clear description "Fail upon reaching 7 ruin" in the icon when you select it. It could be a sign of issues with visual clarity and/or mental space of players in general being too cluttered, that even such clear indicators aren't noticed because they're layered on top of existing clutter.
• Ultimatum modifiers that have the possibility of drastically changing your play. Random projectiles, lessened reach, lessened cooldowns, hindering flasks (until you get immune to hinder), limited flasks, lightning damage taken based on mana costs - these are all subtly clever ways to give a fresh gameplay experience to existing builds that you can skip if you want, but which provide additional challenge (and entice you to do so in the case of Inscribed Ultimatums) where you're willing. They add extra value to Corrupted Blood and Hinder prevention corruptions on Jewels, which led me to Vaaling way more Jewels than I ever did in the past, and discovering the fun gamble that can come with Vaaling Jewels (that you don't intend to use yourself).
• The Trialmaster is fun to fight and a pleasure to kill. I'm a sucker for timestop/memory game mechanics. Also Trialmaster acknowledges Cyclone is OP by using it, but it's nice and satisfying to outrun him when he does that.
• Glimpse of Chaos and Hateforge are really cool Uniques. Special Vaalable items seem right up Chris' alley of items that allow potential great power or new mechanics, but have the risk of irrevocable bricking. Have had my fair share of excitement from Vaal annuls and Vaal ancients on that hat.
• Delirious Maps as Ultimatum Rewards and Atlas passive enabled drops. When trying to grow up from being a casual scrublord, it's always been an economic hurdle to justify using Delirious Orbs yourself rather than selling them - 40 chaos now from selling to players, or try to figure out how to juice your Maps and then gambling it all away for a handful of Simulacrum splinters? But with deli maps being offered from Trialmaster, I had an easy gateway into this world of grey speed-clear farm.
• Challenge design overall. NOT TRIALMASTER CONDITIONAL. A lot of the usual fare of "restrain from killing the boss until he does this, then cull it." I like the feeling of being rewarded for having control of my DPS. I'm weird like that - I enjoyed Vorici missions back in the day because as a casual scrublord, my DPS was never high enough to one-shot these guys. But it was good to remove Vorici missions because benchcrafts are not good to gate behind restraint challenges, whilst cosmetics are fine to. The Divine Shrine challenge was neat because I got to feel clever for snapshotting The Gull shrine duration on that one, plus you're given lots of options to improve your chances of getting a Divine Shrine (Platinum Watchstone prefixes; Infused Domination; Shrine sextants). Atlas Exploration was a bit ploddy but at least I got to pretend I was playing a multi-mirror HH build by unsocketing all my watchstones and then going zoom zoom in white tier Maps.
• Reworked Betrayal. I don't feel punished for not studying the intricacies of how to set up the perfect permanent board and then grind safehouses over and over again. Instead, I can corral the members I'm targeting at a certain time into a certain section, and run Mastermind for a burst of reward. You get Mastermind so much faster than before that it's not painful to get your board reset (albeit speaking from someone who never bothered agonizing over perfect boards). Veiled mods always being T1 and non-crafted was a clever choice that allows for item drops to be "exciting" or "valuable" again - I crafted this from a base that I bought out the market for, even spending 1 ex on a base:
  
  
  
• Incursion temple itemisation. By the muscular golden arse of Innocence, is it nice to finally be able to buy and sell double corrupts without third-party trust-based trading! Before, if I landed a double corrupt, I'd just literally ignore Alva nearly for the rest of the league because "what if I want to double corrupt something?" or "I'll buy a Prism Guardian to corrupt later."
• High endgame gear crafting. Maven's Orb and Awakener's Orb are really quite clever ways of enabling long-term crafting goals on a sliding RNG scale. You can roll influence mods... or you can spend a bunch more to elevate influence mods... or you can spend even more to elevate influence mods and awakener's orb them together, then finish the item off using other means... or you can spend even more (on average) to elevate influence mods, awakener's orb them together and hit a good third prefix or third suffix, and make a truly ludicrous item. Not only that, but when I said "finish off using other means," you have plenty of options as well - you could benchcraft. You could Aisling. You could benchcraft metamod Veiled. You could benchcraft metamod Harvest. You could benchcraft metamod Harvest and Aisling. There are options out there for you to spend multiple mirrors crafting godly gear, up to a mirror crafting amazing gear, dozens of exalts crafting great gear, or a handful of exalts crafting nice gear. At any step, if you're discouraged by RNG, you can simply buy from others who are willing to craft and sell you their bricks. Chris doesn't want us crafting perfect items, and I think that the risk of Awakener's Orb + garbage third suffix or garbage third prefix is a nice way of enabling really long-term chase goals (multiple mirrors), because we're still able to sink in tons of currency on the other 3 modifiers if we don't need an absolute perfect item. For example, I was happy to spend a ton of exalts making this, even though once I hit the garbage 3rd suffix, I knew it would never be "perfect:"
  
• Maven fight overall design, other than usual POE boss economics pain. Will probably talk about the POE boss economic pain in the "dislike" section. I like doing fights blind, so it was kind of neat to figure out, "oh, Maven has an expanding circle of death and you go to the platforms of safety," "oh, if I mouse over this debuff icon I can see she disables all Life recovery other than Flasks." The memory game was frustrating to play around, but satisfying to come up with a strategy to beat.
• Harvest is still strong. Lots of clever ways to build powerful items, such as being allowed to prevent your 16 ex (double elevated) investment from bricking as 6-mod trash via keep prefix/keep suffix, or using metamods plus reforge x, x more likely to target the mods you want, at a steep, steep price. Really worried that it'll get further nerfed because GGG only sees the final results, not the insane investment and/or luck that went into the really good crafts.
• Atlas passive progression allows for differentiated rewards. If you like Breach, you spec Breach and get neat rewards (fuller breaches in Lira, lottery Breachstone drop chance in Proxima). If you like Harvest, you get lucky Harvests. If you like Abysses, you get chunky Abysses. If you like Betrayal, you can rank up and gather intel faster than ever.
• Craftable magic watchstones are brilliant! More of the "play the leagues you like" feel. Plus, they seem to have added so much value to Orbs of Alteration that casual players who are OK with the bot-like feeling of IDing rares and vendoring them for Alts get much more rewarded by the economic impact of alt:chaos ratio from, presumably, Watchstone design.

Stuff I disliked

• Boss-based uniques added to world drop pool. The words that come to mind are monotony, stagnation, blandness. Less boss identity. It's generally good to have differing rewards for differing content, which was taken away by boss uniques being added to world drop. Previously league-restricted content being moved to world drops was a good move because it wasn't really from different content being run, but just arcane rules - people opening Infused Nemesis just to chance or ancient orb HH is definitely not an intuitive way to control Headhunter rarity. So that's good. But boss-restricted Uniques are something completely different. This smacks of unclear vision in game design.
• Maven memory game RNG as to how much distance you have to run. It's pure RNG whether you can practically skip memory game with, e.g., LRLRLRLR, vs whether you need to travel great amounts of distance every time, e.g. ULRULRU. [Suggestion] The way I'd fix this is by making the expanding circle noticeably easier (i.e. expand 30%-50% slower), BUT also make the distance for each section consistently long each time so the average difficulty is the same. I'd do this by making it so you need to reach a beacon at the outer edge of each section, instead of simply entering each section, to execute a memory input. This would also likely need to come with some extra coding to reposition (push away) the DOT grounds so that it doesn't become impossible for builds weak to degen, and would enable some more strategy around DOT ground placement for people who know the fight.
• Harvest can't be used for casual item crafting anymore. The best you can get is slightly infused chaos spam. I really wish there were a better way of enabling gradual progression towards better items for players wanting items worth less than an exalt, or maybe up to 2 exalt items. [Suggestion] The way I would personally implement this is restoring OP crafts like remove x add x (and greatly increasing the chance of OP crafts like add X by itself, remove X by itself), but ONLY for itemlevel 74 and below. This prevents Harvest from becoming an "item editor" for the top-level high-end crafters, while still allowing the average joe to drop a pair of Spiked Gloves and think, "hey, I could use Harvest to make some gloves with 70+ Life, resists, and maybe like 8% attack speed."
• Trialmaster Conditionals. Even though this one was easy for me personally because I probably got average or better-than-average spawns (felt like 1/40 spawn chance for successful T14+ for me up until the time I got the challenge done - it was something like challenge 35/40 for me), my experience is not guaranteed to be the typical experience. Any team member who prescribes a conditional challenge gated behind low-chance RNG needs to, at a minimum, have taken a Stats class and studied the binomial distribution. It is not acceptable that lucky folks like me can get tons of Trialmasters and that several other players are expected to take over 300 T14+ successful Maps to even see a single Trialmaster (0.23% chance of all failures means that on average, 23 out of every 10,000 players will experience the 300 dry streak). That's the definition of unfair.
• Streamer prio. You don't give Usain Bolt a head start just because he's had good performance in the past. You give everyone a fair chance. Streamer prio might have been acceptable if the servers were stable enough at launch that once you made it past the queue, you were guaranteed to stay logged in the entire time, but the forum was flooded with posts confirming that all of us were disconnecting every few minutes, granting a notable advantage to every streamer and streamer-friend blessed enough to skip the queue with each disconnect.
• League-based nodes in Delve appear to have been forgotten. Perandus coins drop in stacks of 2-4 each. LOL. Not picking those up. Not to mention Harbinger nodes dropping shards in a circle makes clicking them significantly more painful.
• POE economic boss pain. This is nothing new, but it continues to be really painful for casual players to break into high endgame play. If a boss fight needs to be learned in order to be beaten, it is super painful to have to sacrifice a ton of time and/or currency into accessing that boss fight, because you are essentially tossing all your ingame currency into the trash. This league I found an economic niche where I was able to make lots of chaos early so I was willing to drop 500 chaos on learning the Maven fight, but it would probably turn off a lot of people from even experiencing a boss fight just because it would make more economic sense to sell it to others. See also: Shaper, Elder, Sirus. [Suggestion] Repurpose the Memory Nexus into the "training dummy" that players have been asking for for years. Add a Cavas' Orb that you can use on any endgame boss fight fragments to consume them and progress towards unlocking a permanently repeatable training arena for the boss fight. E.g. 4 Cavas' Orb + a Shaper set would allow you to unlock a special version of the Shaper fight, accessible for free or a nominal fee (1 Orb of Regret?), wherein there are no death consequences (no EXP loss, no HC->SC), but you also receive no loot nor EXP nor Maven witness progress. (Admittedly the implementation would get a little hackey when it comes to Mastermind and Sirus.

Meta-feedback thoughts
I've seen a ton of negativity around Ultimatum League. I've speculated that this is in large part because we've seen two "simple leagues" in a row - Ritual was a league of kill monsters in a circle, get loot. Ultimatum is a league of kill monsters in a circle, get loot. No Betrayal boards, no Delve maps, no Synthesis tiles, no new item crafting mechanics, no Incursion temple building, no Heist blueprint revealing. But I think it was probably the right choice to make, because it enabled devs to work on reworking old league mechanics (see Incursion, Betrayal above), reduced risk of introducing new performance issues/technical debt, and hopefully kept your devs a little bit more sane rather than having them crunch for 80 hours a week.

Certainly, it could be said that content bloat is a Bad Thing, but I feel like Scarabs and Atlas Passives allow the "bloat" to feel largely optional, for lack of a better word. I feel there is a strong element of taste here, plus complaints about content bloat may be coloured by burnout for players who try to 40/40 every league.

Is/was Ultimatum a good league? I'd say yes, because it adds another nice chunk of content to play and doesn't have any major issues that I've encountered. One exile's trash is another exile's treasure, and I'd like GGG to know I treasure Ultimatum and the game overall.