⭐ Your Scourge Final Impressions? ⭐ ⋆Updated⋆

Summarized:

League Mechanic: Sucks big time, unrewarding and clunky, gazillions of RNG tending to bad.

Core Changes: Best thing in a lot of time, big amount of QoL improvements.


This both statements seem like being repeated for some leagues already, [Removed by Support]

All the extra changes such as the atlas I've liked very much.

But on a pure league mechanic? Without exaggerating, It's a 2/10.

Visually very cool, love the new demon models and man when you shift it makes original delirium even more funny by contrast, because instead of a no-color filter and some fog, this overlay / change looks awesome.

But that's it for the positive for me, for the whole league mechanic.

1) For the entire focus of a mechanic, VERY unrewarding. Yes, the extra 15 lightning damage on my weapon while leveling was cool, but the rest has been pretty garbage. The mechanic feels half baked. I'm vaaling my gear for what, a resistance and a downside? I'm guessing the 'reward' for scourging gear is in the 1/1500 chance of one of the rare upsides. The rest of the time you're bricking piece after piece.

2) Why do scourged items even drop? These aren't fun to pick up, and they have NO use. This isn't like fractured items where you might find a really good one and go craft on it, because it's already vaaled. Yes, you can add some sockets, noice. But I can't actually USE the terribly rolled helm that might have a good upside. I'm really hoping these pre-scourged items aren't supposed to be part of the reward loop for the mechanic, but I have a feeling they are.

3) Mob damage. Specifically on mob damage, is any regular player even in yellow maps supposed to be able to handle an alched map with damage mods, AND double damage + from the scourge mobs? The damage is nuts.

TLDR; Essentially it's this; constantly bricking gear feels very bad. Having to craft said gear to the point you'd wear it, THEN bricking it feels worse. But not having any gear in the scourge-er feels bad as well, so you throw anything you can into it and brick it, then realize even if it got a good scourge mod, you can't actually craft on it. Also dropped scourge gear makes literally no sense unless there's a secret way to craft on it after.

I'd rather play Synthesis then Scourge any day of the week.

Scourge-ing: clunky & unrewarding
Scourge-crafting: clunky & unrewarding

3.16 general changes: ok (I didn't mind 3.15)

Masteries: are generally good idea - but in many cases they have been (kind of) taken from notables without compensation.
GGG should actually consider increasing the general number of skill points ... yeah, let me dream :D :D
At the first reveal I expected masteries to be "free": to be gained when the complete set of nodes (or the notable) was allocated.

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Poison concoction:
I am still enjoying it but I expect too many downsides in the end (losing at least 7 mods, missing main-hand mastery - nothing really makes up for it). Targeting is rather clunky (at least make the projectile not pass [or in this case lob over] a potential target).

There are probably people that like a corruption league, i don't. Corrupt a BiS item, hope to get a good implicit, then scourge to 3 and hope for a 2 in 20 chance. And don't forget prices of uniques are higher because of this. Sure you don't need to min max but the league is just that: gambling corruptions.
and they should remove item level requirements from scourging. Now you can only scourge to 3 items with level 68+.

Scourge is ambitious, but unfortunately ranks closely above Talisman. Constant backtracking as a league mechanism isn't a good design approach, corrupted items are unwieldy and 95% of the time completely useless, visual clarity is even worse than during usual mapping. Started skipping day 2 with a half-leveled crucible tree. 3.16 core changes are alright, the masteries look flashier than they are in practice (essentially more accessible cluster notables with less impact), the new tiered flask suffixes are artificial complexity with no benefit. Similar to 3.15, it feels like the changes saw very little playtesting.

I'm starting to hate it. Lets be honest it's like breach 12.0 but this time half the map is a breach. Hard for them to come up with new ideas for the GGG team get u to "play forever" as Chris calls it - is what it is. They are basically selling a new paint job on your good car every three months now.


Game is good like that car, but fuck if I need a new paint job.

I very quickly went from early impressions (trailer and early story) being almost entirely positive to now that I'm mid maps no longer enjoying the mechanic.

It's extremely unrewarding, especially given the concept of risk reward from continually delving into the scourge dimension. I haven't found anything good from krangles on items, none of the krangled items picked up from the ground have been very good, the monsters in scourge don't seem to drop hardly anything. My krangled maps have given very very little as well, especially considering how much bake time they need.

It also feels a lot like Incursion league where I jump into the mechanic and I get machine gunned down in all directions before I can so much as cast a spell, the stun is not nearly wide enough.


I love, LOVE, the core changes they put in. Aspirational content is what I live for in PoE. The masteries on the tree are a really nice and welcome change and seem to give a breath of fresh air to the passive tree. Trimming Atlas progression to get people who don't have as much time to play into the end game is a net positive as well. There's a lot of good to enjoy here in the core, I'm just not vibing with the league itself, and in general the trends around defensives I don't think is a positive one.

I'm hopeful for 3.17, but I think I'll be out of this league very quickly.

I'm enjoying the mechanic. It's closer to delirium than other leagues in my opinion, with a different reward system. The predictable 6-Links is pretty nice.

The transformed items are junk almost always, and not just any kind of junk. Special junk.

Just got this off a boss in the krangleverse..



Now that's just funny bad. And unfortunately pretty symbolic of my experience with the items that are transformed.

I mean -270% damage. I'm sure some builds can work with that. Minion builds that use fencoil. Of course.

Impossible to play and have fun. Game finally looks dead.

So getting a -2 to socketed gems is over 200 times more likely than getting a +1 to socketed gems. There is no -1 to socketed gems and there is no +2 to socketed gems. The league mechanic is grinding to most likely bricking your item. I'm in awe. I award this to GGG: