Expedition, what is there but mainly what is not: a wider reasoning about poe

Hi everybody,

This is my first, and probably last attempt to be a proactive member of
this community as this post took me quite a bit of effort to put together.

Some disclaimer first: I am not the absolute keeper of the true truth, none of us is. I am just a poe player that is trying to express his personal opinion from his personal limited but fair point of view.

With that in mind all comments/corrections/alternatives opinions are welcomed, I will respect them as I hope you will respect mine.

At the time of writing v.3.15 has just been released but this post is not for blindly complaining about all the nerfs included rather to express
concerns about some of the changes made but mostly the disappointment of those changes that didn't make in this last release.
The following list includes at least some topics that, in my opinion are problematic for poe, and for each of them i will do the effort
to proactively propose some solutions however i don't want to sell any of them in any way, any alternative for me is as good as mine.
As the post is long i provided a sort of index

1)Too much grinding before reaching the real fun
2)Reactive Gaming Issues
3)No More Services
4)No Guinea Pig
5)Third Party Tools
6)Bosses are becoming irrelevant
7)Tons of useless items
8)Awakened Gems
9)Trade Tab
10)Six Links


1) Too much grinding before reaching the real fun.
In my opinion, even before 3.15, it took too much time to reach the part of the game where the real fun is.
Everyone I know, including myself, just want to fly though the acts, reaching maps asap and start grinding some real content.
Even more tedious is trying to complete the atlas. Most of the maps you only do once with the sole purpose
to have the completion bonus, other maps are completely ignored just because they are not good enough (layout/density/boss).
At the end you target 1, 2, 3 good maps and farm them.
The Latest changes, and probably the next ones, make this process even slower and thus in my opinion more boring.Note here i am talking about the time, not the difficulty to progress through the game.
GGG wants the game to be slower and more challenging? Fair enough, let's bring this to where it is also fun.
Possibilities:
Acts: make them as hard and challenging as you want for the first character but additional characters start at level 68.
Atlas: less but harder maps, i would say 50% of the current map pool can go. Maps can rotate from league to league. You can add new maps to replace unused ones.
One possible idea for maps: adding static properties (like implicits) to maps might help to promote/balance maps. Like: Toxic Sewer can have: 20% increase poison damage taken and received to better represent the map environment.

2) Reactive Gaming Issues
This is very subjective but to me it's quite hard to notice when my char is burned/poisoned/bleeding or even shocked.
The visual effect is totally invisible to me due to the chaos happening on the map, sometimes i notice the icon on the top corner but most of the time it is my life pool going down that indicates to me that something is going wrong.
If GGG game direction is to force players to react to events then those events need to be evident and allow a decent amount of time to be addressed.
It's unreasonable to expect people to realize which flask to use in 1 second or less, considering you have to look at the top corner, realize what's going on and click the correct flask.
I know we have triggers now but those should be a QoL rather than a prerequisite to survive.
Possibilities:
Makes ailments more evident. Maybe with icons more central to the player point of view.
Make damage from aliments being applied with a sort of exponential rather than linear progression. This probably will give people more time to react in the early stages.
Auto suggests the correct flask to click if an applicable flask exists. Like an arrow on top of your "of Curing" flask if you are currently poisoned.

3) No More Services
I hate services, I use/provide them because I have no alternatives. In my opinion every service requested on TFT is a clear indication of something not working fine in the game.
GGG really did a great job in my opinion with the Temple Chronicles and I was really hoping they would have continued in this release.
I know some services are not as easy to remove but others are, especially the ones that resemble regular trades.
Solo self found apart trading is a very relevant part of this game and my opinion is if i can't trade good, it's useless.
For me, services more in need for this change are: all syndicate services, sulphite rotas, harvest services.
Possibilities:
Sulphite: GGG may allow us to sell the collected sulphite. Sulphite could be stored in "container" of 5k size each and just traded. We can already sell azurite with resonators,
why not sulphite?
Syndicate: a similar approach  to what GGG did for the temple: say when you kill Caterina you collect the "Caterina Head", this is a map fragment like the chronicles  and you can use it to access all the syndicate rooms you had when you killed Caterina. Now this item is tradable and finally no one can cheat on having Vorici T4 vs Vorici T3.
Harvest: this really needs some sort of fix despite what i'm writing here. In my opinion the harvest crafts you collect need to be tradable. GGG can balance the crafts as they want but once the monsters are killed the player should be able to collect the crafts into tradable items, or put the collected crafts into a tradable containers, like beasts can be put into a bestiary orb, and just trade them.TFT should not be the market-place for harvest.

4) No Guinea Pig
Let's take the last Aliasing changes as an example, this is the last of a list of changes that I am happy with but I don't get why they made into the game in the first place.
Something new is introduced, it gets changed/nerfed just after.
Other examples are: Harvest, self chill or Diplomatic Escort.
I understand that it is very difficult to test everything in such a short amount of time before lunch but on the other hand those mechanics looked powerful from the very beginning and it is difficult to believe GGG totally didn't see that.
The overall result is that the current trust I personally have when GGG says "we tested extensively" is quite low and the impression is that we "the players" are treated as guinea pigs.
Note, I totally understand there could be errors/mistakes etc but those above seams just....too big to be justified with a regular "we didn't' realize it".
Possibilities:
I know this looks pretending but GGG should avoid this kind of dynamics, no one likes to be the guinea pig :(.
Maybe more tests, maybe more communications. For example telling upfront that they are not sure about a specific feature they added might be a good step in this direction.

5) Third Party Tools
A major aspect I never liked is the need to have many third-party tools to play PoE. Just to cite the major ones: PoB, loot filters, all trading macro/tools.
The question is: if tomorrow PoB guys stop to work for us, what do we do? We leverage the info on the char tab to create our character? Do we do the math ourselves?
In my opinion it is incredible that such critical tools exist outside the game and GGG is not addressing the big problems that those tools solve in house.
Possibilities:
PoB (or equivalent tool) should be part of PoE, as an additional tool or part of the main game. It should be advertised and new players should be pointed to it.  
At least a base version of what trade macros offers should be provided in game by the trade tab.Regarding filters I have a separate point later in the list.
Note: I am not implying everything should come for free, access to those tools might imply a fair payment.


6) Bosses are becoming irrelevant.
I know this topic depends a lot on when you are in the league but my feeling is that some bosses are simply much less relevant than others.
In my opinion each boss should have some good reason to exist and be chased. Atm i feel Sirius, The Elder, Uber Elder and Cortex are in a good spot,
Atziri and Caterina got a just bit better last league, but not much.Other bosses kinda play in a B-league and they are treated like sub-bosses.
The Shaper is the one in the worst position, the best item, the Starforge is....depressing. The Maven is similar, if we exclude the maven orb i don't know why i should do it.
All the Elder bosses, Shaper bosses and Sirius bosses feels, in my opinion, just "in the way" to get to the real bosses you want to do.
Possibilities:
Each major boss needs to have at least one strong drop that can drop only from him that you need to be happy to farm because it's strong.
Each lesser boss still needs to have some peculiar item, less strong, but at least usable that gives that boss a reason to exist.
Maybe some bosses' unique items pool could be refreshed by removing the useless ones and replacing them with others.
Another option is to tie the boss kill to something else like the Pale Court that allows you for multimod craft, the 5way army for the fifth slot or the Heart of the Grove for 15ths slot.
This in my opinion could make some bosses a bit more relevant.

7) Tons of useless items
There is a reason if having a good filter is mandatory in POE and this, in my opinion, is a bad reason: You can't play without filters.
In my opinion filters should be just needed by people that want to farm specific items/currency in order to go quicker, not a prerequisite to play the game.
What happens if filterblade closes? Do we stop playing?
In my opinion the game should be playable with no filters. This implies less and more relevant drops, and those drops need to be better in line with player level
and expectations not only in terms of item level or mod tiers but also as overall item power, this means more links, better rolls, better bases.
Possibilities:
A progressive approach in drops might be considered. It would have a similar effect of what new players achieve by manually changing filters while they progress the game.This would heavily reduce the useless items. After that if someone still wants to use a filter fair enough.

8) Awakened Gems
Some gems got so nerfed that it seems to me they lost most, if not all, their fashion. I got the reduction of damage but leveling an awakened gem to level 5
is a quite challenging task and the bonus effect at level 5 should reflect it.
As reference i am thinking about Awakened Brutality and Awakened Hex Touch, but not only.
Possibilities:
In this case I think there is no harm in restoring a bit of power to those gems to make them feel again worth having.

9) Trade Tab
I know this might be controversial but, if  a Trade League exists this in my mind implies that you should be able to trade. I remember when I first discovered that I could not sell
my items if I didn't have a Trade Tab. I know you can do it in the forums, in the trade chat, etc etc but for me all those channels are
too clunky to use and in reality players are simply stuck in a "not trading" trade league and with very hard time to progress.
Possibilities:
A free trade tab, maybe smaller, maybe with less features should be added for all players.

10) Six Links
I know in POE2 links will be gone but meanwhile now for me they are an issue. Most of the items got their value only for being 6 linked. Regular Starforge? 30c, 6 Linked Starforge? 3ex. For me this is not good as you basically ruin all the excitement of finding an item you know is useless if not six linked.
Possibilities:
Here my only suggestion is that the amount of funding required to 6link something should be drastically reduced.


This list is not meant to be complete/correct in any way. It's just what I came up with so far with my limited knowledge.
I really hope this effort of mine could help somehow to make this game more fun, successful, entertaining.

Again if you want to correct/comment or point out errors please do it....politely, i will appreciate it.
If I offended someone in writing this post apologies, that was not intentional.

Regards