[Serious] Please reconsider bossfights required for voidstones next league

First two voidstones (eater, exarch) can be done on basically any build, especially "story difficulty". However Maven and Uber Elder can be borderline impossible if you lack damage to a certain degree. This is a problem for many off-meta builds.

This leads to me (and many other players I'd guess) being stuck with 2 voidstones for the entirety of the league.

It really hurts retention as I get burned out on running the same layouts easily. Instead of playing for hours at a time it is usually me throwing in 5-6 maps at a time and then just quitting the game. Previous league through the "conquerer atlas" (which was overall way too complicated and way worse subjectively) I would play a lot more at a time since map variety was a lot better (easier to attain all watchstones). It's a shame that now with the new Atlas out of 100 maps available I am really just running around 15 of them in rotation, considering that in endgame farming you really want to run tier 14+ and of course there are layouts you just won't like. Also never running your favorite layouts (in my case Atoll and City Square, both sub t14 with 2 voidstones) doesn't feel good.

Just in case I'd like to also address "boss carries": I and many other players have zero interest in that. Not even playing in SSF, but simply paying for someone with a broken build/mirrors invested into the build doing content for you doesn't feel right. I won't ever do it. I will quit the game first.

Also I want to add that I used to do The Feared, Maven, Uber Elder farming a lot and it just comes down to the build you are playing. So not just some random casual being bad at the game complaining here. Those fights do not require a lot of skill, just the right build. Which I like actually, that there is aspirational boss content to measure your character against. My main concern here is just that not having all voidstones negatively alters your endgame playing experience too much, drastically reducing felt variety. And I feel that fights like Uber Elder and Maven should be in the "min max" favourite map slot category. While fights like normal Elder and Shaper would feel much more appropiate for voidstones (which I would consider core game progression for players engaging with PoE's endgame for many hours each league).

Just one last time I wanna stress that this is a serious issue I feel. I played a lot this league, because most changes this patch were great and the game feels like it is in a pretty good state overall right now. However with so few of the available map layouts to actually run day to day I feel like my playtime over the course of the next leagues will be a LOT lower.

While I don't disagree, its important to also understand the game platform perspective as well as it's goals as related to your feedback.

It has been my experience over the lifetime of Path of Exile that the design state where content is not widely accessible is justified under the guise of "Aspirational Content". By this, GGG does not design for or even intend for every or even most builds to successfully clear the baseline of content. As such, a very large part of the general content is not only inaccessible to a (large?) chunk of players but is demonstrably intended to be showcase content. The content exists in a state where new or revisiting players may be exposed to it through gaming content and social medium platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, etc). Players come in, and that draw is the -number 1 goal-. This is why you'll see bugs go untouched for months or content released in whatever state it is in: Its all about keeping the service up and pushing the next release of new content, on time. Only in the most recent history did this cycle change, but it was very much beyond anyone's control to do otherwise (global pandemic). It has been transparently discussed time and time again that a bulk of revenue for GGG is made within the first 2 weeks of each league, and there is always an expected huge drop off of players after the first few weeks of a league. This is again, by design and expected: Having players play for long periods of time isn't the goal, its to get them to come back into the game (+store) again at some point.

So to better set your expectations: Change will be constant in terms of adding and ice-boxing (nerfing, without outright removing) your choices of class, gear, and skills for being able to tackle all available content in order to keep the game seasonally fresh (new content, every 3 months). Your feedback on content being inaccessible will be wholly ignored as it does not align with the key goals of the game.

The game itself is not aiming to be widely accessible or even have huge player counts. In fact, as seen with Delirium (the peak of loot explosions) and leading into the Harvest league (Horticrafters+nem3 explosions): If too many players are playing, as items are sent to storage (stash) the backend infrastructure starts to fall apart in a number of ways which affects several of the game systems [1]. The very first nerfs to Horticrafters were because of the strain put on the backend (database) of the game when people began storing, in bulk, the horticrafter devices in their stash then accessing that non-indexed data to place horticrafters directly from their stash. This is why ever since those leagues we've started to see some items deleted post-league and (arguably, abysmal) limits put into place on things like league-mechanic stashes. The backend design has limits and it would simply cost more than desired to scale the infrastructure out or require significant development time to rewrite game infrastructure systems. Thus it's fine for GGG to see only a peak of 150-250k players at the very start of the league. The net revenue from league-launch MTX sales is more than enough to be profitable across the life of the total revenue deferment, even after capex+opex costs. Too many players would crush the game stability (very bad) and incur unwanted or risky capex costs to scale out the infrastructure.

While not SSF, I cannot stand trade and this includes participating in boss carries. I will go out of my way to avoid trade as much as possible. The trade system (again, by design [2]) is absolutely and intentionally a giant middle finger to the player but what makes it even worse is the player base: There's so many scammers and grifters that I just don't have patience to deal with the bullshit. There are several players that I've encountered that constantly scam league after league, and those accounts are still active doing just fine. With regard to content progression: if I have a "god mode" character or I'm just getting carried: then what's the point? There's no dopamine reward if there's zero risk or zero consequence or I've done nothing to invest in building up a strong character. To me, a boss carry falls into that godmod-cheatcode category: that's just not what I want.

Rather than list them here (as that could be seen as advertising), I'll simply point out there are a number of other great games out there, games that even fall into the same style of game that Path of Exile tries to satisfy. Check them out! ..and see you in a future league, probably.

[1] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2924277
"... The Harvest mechanic also creates some database issues in terms of the amount of data being stored. This is a non-trivial technical problem we would need to resolve before allowing it to exist long-term ..."
[2] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

Uber elder should come after Normal elder

add non-uber elder and maven fights

add Uber versions of the eater/exarc/maven

add uber tier versions of the watchstones with unique effects

who's testing this stuff GGG? Who's providing you feedback before release? They are very clearly not very in-the-know about PoE and its Community in general, You should really examine who you're letting get close enough to give feedback on this stuff because they are taking you for a literal ride, I could've told you at inception that this would have caused outrage and given you a very simple solution that is also FRIENDLY to the system of (normal) -> (uber) Progression further building instead of breaking down the rich universe you've built after so many years.

No.
Your off meta build needs work, this is the games way of telling you that.
If you’re trade league you can make anything work with enough currency. If you don’t wanna do that just buy the completions.

Oh yeah, also give everyone free mageblood, revert harvest and delete exp penalty so even chimp can get lvl100 and roll over content with free mirror tier eq.
pass

Why do you think you deserve the rest of the two stones if you refuse to put in the work? Do you want a mageblood as well wrapped around your plate?

+1

At least with the previous Atlas, you could grind conquerors to max out the maps. It's a huge leap in gear requirement to go from conquerors to aspirational bosses in order to get the same end result we had previously.

Aspirational bosses should be optional, not required. Getting all maps to T16 isn't something I consider to be aspirational compared to grinding Maven for her orb or Uber Elder for eyes.

My 2 cents is they should just move the elder voidstone to regular elder and make it so that 3 voidstones are equivalent to having all the watchstones, namely: Entire atlas on t14+. The current state of only have half of the atlas on 13+ and having to beat 2 bosses that demant WAY better gear than you need to farm a t16 map to be able to play red maps on every map is weird, you have to beat content to unlock easier content? huh?

The final voidstone can stay with the maven... having the whole atlas on 16 can be the aspirational content

"

Apathy1 wrote:

Why do you think you deserve the rest of the two stones if you refuse to put in the work? Do you want a mageblood as well wrapped around your plate?

This is not a question of deserving !!

Maven and Uber Elder figts need a good / very good DPS to be won.

Gating 02 voidstones behind those bosses is gating access to T16 maps whom is the base of the late end game farming.

I can't understand why GGG has done that. The ancient atlas could let you have all your altas in T16 easily without any mandatory hard boss fight.

It's this new age of gamers. I dont know when this happened...please someone tell me when this happened!!!!???

They are just so entitled to everything and dont ever want to be challenged. So instead of looking inward, asking themselves, "hey how can I improve?" or "what could I do differently to beat this boss?". They immediately go on the offensive since mommy always told them they were perfect, so it must be everything else that is the problem.

The recent Elden Ring has seen this kind of behavior and hot takes from these entitled little cry babies and it's such a joke. I don't want companies to cave to this sort of behavior letting them know its okay to act like this.

You want all the maps to be t16? Then grow/learn and beat the bosses.

Or if you're trade and just cant handle killing them. Buy the damn completion.