Expedition League is only for the true hardcore fans of this game

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

I wouldn't call it great. It's fine. I'm not avoiding the encounters.

I will say that the "immune to x,y,z" mods and the "no leech" mod come way too early. They're essentially "you have to avoid this one or die" mods.

this, it's harder to get conversion supports like Phys to Lightning/Cold to Fire or items that give you trinity-like redistribution when you see something like this, when you're leveling. Same with no leech/regen, at level 75 you have lots of options but during acts you don't have a lot of tools to adapt. And with CI mobs it's just "coat the ground with flame dash skid marks and hope they slow roast to death".

@Hasunic:

your build guides have always been an inspiration and very good for learning the 'bigger picture' on how to approach poe problem solving. I look forward to seeing what you do next whether it's here or in another game.
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As for true hardcore, I think there's a difference between challenging players' critical thinking skills and adaptability, and making the mechanical inputs of the game the forefront of your new "challenge". I guess some folks are still confused on this point.

Dark Souls is successful because it's mechanically challenging on a Dark Souls UI and UX background. Mount and Blade and Warbands have a huge following because although they are pretty clunky combat sims, they fit the UI and scale of the game.

I like PoE because it's strategically challenging on a PoE UI and UX scale. Automating and condensing some player processes, abilities, and actions make sense for the sake of this UI and scale - letting players focus on making strategic decisions or taking bigger, more lasting risks. Requiring a 20-minute trade of blows, sidesteps, and parries against your typical pack of incursion room monsters or bosses with continual adds, just won't work.

Without a zoom function, it's hard to even tell which way one of dozens of mobs in a pack is facing, where they are in their casting or attack animation/cycle, what their nemesis mod is, etc. Too much going on, zoomed too far out, to micromanage traffic this way. It's very pretty on full graphics - but not in a useful way.

Not to mention, monsters and players are NOT balanced for micro combat style play. If you want to see this writ in plain words, just challenge someone to pvp. It's a oneshot spamfest, over in a few tenths of a second. Damage scaling is patchwork at best and nonexistent as a rule. There's no fatigue/rage factor that kicks in with fight duration or turf advantage, because there IS no fight duration. These are mechanics that work in a 1up game, but not in poe.

Throw in the steadily growing issues with lag/stutter, rubberbanding, desync, FPS drops, CPU multithreading issues, invisible skill/MTX/boss bugs, and just general texture issues, and the opportunity cost to play the game as it has been, let alone as planned in a Dark Souls-like microing style, just feels like too much. Unless of course, your goal is to have the servers populated almost entirely by bots selling Divination Distillates to each other.

The league mechanic itself is pretty accessible. It's a fun little puzzle to figure out optimizing.

If you mean the balance patch to the core game that came with the league...maybe. They already announced sweeping changes just 3 days into the patch. Who can say they won't change course again in 3 more days? Too early to evaluate that.

Yeah, I think Expedition itself ranks with one of the better league mechanics, but then I liked Synthesis (after the mountain of fixes and patches to make it actually work) Betrayal and Heist, those are my go-tos because they're thought-provoking, have great voice lines, cool backstories, neat premises, and a refreshing big-picture non-linear minigame that plays well with the atlas grind (or in the case of heist is a nice vacation from atlas grinding).

But just reading about the currency pickups, regardless of where i'm supposed to stick them, gave me carpal tunnel.

"

Acolina87 wrote:

League is great boys.

*Shrug*. Enjoy your little purity test league, I guess?

Just remember that after a certain point, fewer players is going to mean less income for GGG. Which will usually result in the balance tipping hard in the other direction, or the game receiving reduced development resources.

This reminds me a great deal of the WoW: Cataclysm expansion, where a specific dev pushed a 'WoW was always meant to be hard' mindset that resulted in a catastrophic drop in players.

Eventually, he was forced to retire and the devs overcorrected in the other direction.

The game isn't too hard, its boring. I was at exilecon and played the more difficult PoE 2 demo, it was fun, this is not.

We've had the same endgame for 3 leagues in a row and it drags. And instead of switching things up, they've just tried to make it slower.

We've got too many things to click, so they added 20 more currencies. Which apparently isn't an inconvenience because now we can dump and re-sort our inventory in the middle of the map...?

Many skill gems have been neglected for years, instead of changing them they blanket nerf almost everything and add 20 more new ones.

Another league where interesting content is too rare (log books) and bosses are pure RNG hunts.

Another crafting mechanic where fun was detected and we can't have players making gear progression without first praying to chris, crafting a back-up item, and bricking even more items in between upgrades. Or you know, play trade league and just farm currency 99% of the time because its cheaper and faster to buy everything (and boring). P.s. Don't worry, Rog won't survive this league if it goes core either.

I'm not sure how you can be a hardcore fan of the game and not worried by the massive player drop-off we've seen this league. This is more than damage nerfs, those are fine. There were many glaringly obvious problems with the patch and GGG have already acknowledged some changes weren't as well thought out and are walking back some of the nerfs.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I don't really see value in this gatekeeping, one side vs the other crap. I'd much rather see more healthy discussion about what changes are good or bad and why.

So OP, what makes this a great league to you, and what changes have you had the most fun with?

the league itself, outside of the general state of the game, is average at best

too much micromanagement (similar to blight): you place the charges (and you should pay attention where you place them), detonate, kill mobs, open boxes... meh. its blight-level of tedium

rewards as of now (day 3 of the league) are terrible. 20 splinters without auto-loot = lol, the only good thing about the league content is i think the fat guy, who can sell + craft items, thats a decent addition

i would easilly put 200-300 hrs into the league and bought 1-2 supp packs because i have nothing to do currently with my nihilistic and escapist life, the problems are 3.14 and 3.15 patches have destroyed the core game and core gameplay completely

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Necrotekk wrote:

You keep using the word "hard" and well..this league isn't LOL. It's boring.

So I guess the real difficulty is convincing yourself the games still fun while objectively less of everything is there. Sounds more like you're insecure and need to convince yourself playing the "hard" poe is a badge of honor lol

I like to bait people into getting probation hehehehe.

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Acolina87 wrote:

"

Necrotekk wrote:

You keep using the word "hard" and well..this league isn't LOL. It's boring.

So I guess the real difficulty is convincing yourself the games still fun while objectively less of everything is there. Sounds more like you're insecure and need to convince yourself playing the "hard" poe is a badge of honor lol

I like to bait people into getting probation hehehehe.

At least you're only doing it to the crybabies.

This league is just for the "super ultra turbo hardcore stronk players" :V

ah~ Im really glad that people is having fun and dont lose their game like what happened to the "weak whining casual crybaby normie 23% players" like me.

Good luck! and enjoy, who knows when that will end? maybe someday GGG decide to make 3.13 POE classic server xDDDDD and make happy both audiences, but something tells me that is not "their vision".

Just in case, im joking :V but I feel like probable someone will get offended anyway u.u

"

Acolina87 wrote:

"

Necrotekk wrote:

You keep using the word "hard" and well..this league isn't LOL. It's boring.

So I guess the real difficulty is convincing yourself the games still fun while objectively less of everything is there. Sounds more like you're insecure and need to convince yourself playing the "hard" poe is a badge of honor lol

I like to bait people into getting probation hehehehe.

I was surprised it took that long...