How would you do things?

Since every league has more flaws than good gains, how would you do things?

Two questions

A - How would you change/add current leagues onto a stripped core game?

B - What would your next league look like if you could decide?


Let's say all old league mechanics are gone and we have only the base core game. What leagues would you add to the game? And by core game I mean all past leagues are gone, the game has nothing but the basic core mechanics.
You can modify them as you please.

I think I would go with
1) delve
2) some "area action" combining abyss, breach, and also expedition loot boxes that can be all found in a delirium fog, with a rampage maybe on top.
3) invasion, random enemies spawning and just being there to be killed or not, like rogue exiles who always drop a talisman as amulet, that's a nice hybrid, bestiary beasts and tormented spirits all in the same category, always rng, not forced to all spawn at once every time though.
4) heist

I think that would give the most content while staying relatively "unbloated".
You got 2 places to go do stuff, then chase enemies and be chased.

As for the all new league, yes you guessed it:

This one

"

OneTwoTimer wrote:

Since every league has more flaws than good gains

thats your opinion , you dont talk for the 90% of people who dont rant here or somewhere else and enjoy each new league

League mechanics I'd add back in would be -

Essence
Abyss
Bestiary
Incursion
Delve
Betrayal
Synthesis (no Synthesizer tho)
Blight
Delirium
Heist
Ultimatum
Expedition
Archnemesis (with an expanded inventory)

Though I should note here that I would also add back in all the other league-specific items as well, just as generic drops.

Overall the intention is for the game to still have all the same variety of content as it does, just without what I regard as a whole lot of redundant i.e. very similar league mechanics. For instance, I view Archnemesis as a straight up improvement over Metamorph as it has more depth thanks to the recipes. Hence Metamorph is dropped. Leagues like Breach and Legion are subsumed by Abyss and Delirium, whose drops are also more important. Ultimatum I'd really like them to just fuse with Ritual, such that we get a Ritual reward screen after completing an Ultimatum encounter to generate tribute.

Harvest can go die in a fire. The more useful crafts from it can be added to Bestiary, nerfed if needed.

They've released 36 leagues to date, most of which are still in the game in some form or the other. This cuts it down to just 13, while preserving variety

Much like most things, I'd leave it to professionals. A game I made would likely suck balls. Glad we have people and resources making games I'd actually like to play.

For me the game starts to feel disjointed once the actual content is done away from maps. Heist and Delve to me are the biggest examples. You find the relative contracts or sulphite on maps but then end up spending plenty of time away from maps. I dislike Mini-game mechanics where the content feels like it is entirely disjointed from your progression.

If it were up to me I would drop heist alltogether. The mechanic is still buggy and the grind to level up your team members is terrible. I could ignore it but sadly I find that for casual play it is still the most profitable content. I am sure that GGG's metrics show that it is popular but my gut tells me lots of people do it because of how rewarding it is, despite the bad mechanics. You could add a button in you hide-out that has a .0001% chance to drop a mirror every time you click it and the metrics would still show that people spend massive amounts of time clicking a button. Popular by stats but trash tier content. thats what Heist feels like to me. Just incorporate the grand heist loot in to different parts of the game and get rid of it. It's bloated, punishing and tedious ( to me at least ). The risk/reward however is off as I feel it is too rewarding at the moment to ignore. If the return/hour was in line with other content the rogue harbor would be a wasteland imo.

Delve at least has a decent risk/reward as to make it feel ok to ignore it yet still worth doing. I wouldn't mind it being in the game but feel like it isn't really part of the game but more of a mini-game. Either get rid of it or embrace it. Stop making delve a core mechanic as one of the map device missions and allow players to delve as they please without the need for sulphite. Make max depth level depend on the light radius for example so that players need to farm azurite to get deeper. Again, kind of indifferent as you can just ignore it without feeling like you are missing out.

Any mechanic that just flows in to the content you are doing is fine by me and I like the change of pace so the other mechanics feel fine. 95% in maps and then the option to do the end game part away from it feels like the most well incorporated league mechanic set-up. I dislike archnemesis due to poor ui and micro management and I feel like betrayal is also too convoluted. I have spreadsheets open at work all day, I don't want to unwind by having them open to play a game. I hope archnemesis doesn't go core. Betrayal could do with a rework to make it playable without research or cheat sheets.

As for a new league mechanic I would like to see more in-map content that doens't require a cheat sheet. Maybe something bounty based where you hunt down specific enemies in specific areas or maps. You get a "bounty" that can be added to a map in the device, a special targeted monster or rogue exile is added to the map together with some map modifiers, possibly linked to certain reward types. a new way to boost maps other than scarabs and delirium focused more on making what is in a map harder or adding new bosses to maps rather than pushing density and clear speed to extremes. just a spitball idea. Just not a new league with an antire side story and game that has nothing to with maps other than a cache or something similar.

I think Heist's biggest problem, at least for me, is that it's not level equivalent with other content of the same level. The mobs are harder to kill and hit a whole lot harder. Adding to that the doors that add a defensive layer to them and you get something you have overpower the rest of the content of the game to enjoy. They need to equalize things.

- Remove or greatly increase the Sulphite cap.

- Speaking of delve, reverting the Fossil nerfs.

- Bring back Synthesis in it's full glory, Synthesiser included though with a better UI.

- Remove scarabs and integrate them to League stones. They practically serve the same purpose but I personally find the League stones format far more superior over scarabs.

- Get rid of the #% chance for x content to spawn in maps as you would run League stones permanently.

- Use the Atlas passives template but not in the boring way GGG does currently. Instead of picking a variety of content that would only have a chance to appear in maps while only select few mechanics are granted 100% spawn rate and as a result just ending up bloating maps, you would now trade x content for y content. Pick Harvest to spawn every map but also pick 1 content you will never ever encounter (i.e pick Harvest every map but you never see Ritual). This would solve multiple problems at once:

1) You wouldn't do content you don't want to do (personally I can't stomach Ritual or Metamorph), but not only that, you'd do much more of the content that you actually want to do (Expedition every map sounds nice).

2) You wouldn't do x content without passives for said content which feels bad at the moment (i.e doing Incursion without Incursion passives feels very underwhelming, same goes for most other mechanics).

3) You wouldn't bloat maps.

4) You would finally get rid of the previously mentioned #% chance for x mechanic to spawn in maps.

- Less of the Celestial stuff and much more of the dark & gritty Vaal and Ezomyte stuff that PoE was founded on.

- Return of Race Seasons, probably instead of leagues to spice things up throughout the year. I'd personally rather they do 1 or 2 4-5 month rich leagues like Delve or Synthesis a year than 4 boring ones like Breach & Legion. Of course they do the 4 league format because of numbers & revenue hence why I suggest using Race Seasons and worthy rewards to spice things up if you get bored of the ongoing league.

- Removing most slows & on-kill effects which clutter this game in an uncreative way.

And 2 things personally for myself:

- Reverting Sunder.

- Giving PvP some love.

I like a simple game. Move fast, kill shit, collect loot. I'd delete about 60% of mechanics that slow my roll.
Betrayal, harvest, heist (doors at least), Expedition, etc. Even Breach is too much down time for me.

If you look at my atlas passive it's mainly old school how this game was pre Gen 3, before they got all fancy -


https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-atlas-skill-tree/AAAABgAAggAbALoIPwn4CvsLcQzgDr4PzBCwENwU2hfLGYIbThtkHlsfOB9mKNAphy3QLosuvjADMyA0iEGMQndDI0NLSg5KX09hT9hQOVGCU_tX41hFWRZb811PXbddx14qYCFiKWO1ZrVn6WiyadVp3GxJbf1uKm9_cstzi3ZUdsJ4hH0Tf6SIGYhtitGNTo-3kU2RfZGMkiySsJbNnCudXp2HnkmgXaHRot6jiabEqrWrrKwQrB-t1q_BsfuyZrX9tui3K7qywPXC_8X-xjPHs8h-yOXJoc6R0STRY9SH1LnVZtag1tvcTd8j317ip-N85Y_l7Oco6o3q1fVM9g34Ifj6-jD9yf3RAAA=


All in on:
Strong boxes
Beyond
Harbinger
etc

Imo, its time to double down on the map device 'rotating list' of mechanics.

Each league keeps the masters we have.
Each league has its own league mechanic.
theres a set of mechanics that 'always' exist: strongboxes, essence, breach (beyond nemesis bloodlines as map mods stay)

and then the map device has 4-5 mechanics. those are the *only* mechanics that can spawn randomly. scarabs for the missing mechanics do not drop this league, and rewards associated with the league will not exist.

no legion? no 5 ways, no timeless jewels, no 5part map device.
no blight? no annoints, no singing.
no abyss? no stygians.
no ritual? no blizz crowns.
no deli? no clusters.
etc etc

this also shakes up the meta *without* having to nerf a skill into the ground. build doesnt function without a legion keystone? play it next league.


with the caveat that a mechanic is always available at least 1 league out of the year.


standard stays as it is now : everything exists, nothing is off the table.

Most of its streamlining for me, there are some features that I think should just get cut primarily because the opportunity cost of running a particular content isn't considered often enough.

So for delve Azurite and Sulphite should honestly go, also the atlas passives should be changed to provide benefits to drops in the mine rather than weirdass benefits like they are atm.

This is because time spent delving is already time not spent mapping, it has a cost and depending on your efficiency its a pretty harsh one. Also nobody who wants to delve atm is sulphite limited because scarabs drop like candy, its just a redundant mechanic.

Same for Heist and honestly they should have done this at the time, remove rogue gear/levels and regular contracts have blueprints drop fully revealed as juice content for you to run for a reward - basically the same as blight maps.

The fact they obviously feel they put a shitload of work into the various features, voice acting, mechanics etc doesn't change that they should have a similar approach to leagues to what the players do, that ones done keep the best bits chuck out the rest.

Those are the big two to me the rest of the game feels pretty smooth atm i'm really enjoying the league I just mentally sigh when I have to do yet another mandatory 10 hours of leveling rogues because i'm allowed to do anything useful with them.