I've been enjoying the new mods, personally, but it highlights the core issue of PoE

POE's depth has always been grand to the point that player power has always been there. Build diversity is still a thing, once players get more gear or special uniques that allow other builds to start working. Omnicience is one such example. Some builds just don't even get to play the game until they get that necklace. There are just way too many forms of defenses that builds have to get to become viable in this point in the game, unless you are super juiced dps to the point of "kill or be killed".

On the other hand, other builds that want to turn on can't. The Archnemesis mods, while I personally haven't had much issue with them, yes there are specific situations that make them ridiculous, I have mostly enjoyed my stay in the league. In fact, hot take, I think archnemesis was good for the game. Sure, it needs tweaking and some work but I definitely think this is the right direction for the game. However, I don't think that it should stay designed the way it is.

PoE's foundation is always RNG and building your character to overcome every potential outcome. While I'm not saying that defenses should be nerfed. I'm saying there should be more power in other forms of defenses and not just having to stack every kind of defense known to man. What this does is force players to play specific builds that get a solid form of offensive damage while also gaining significant amounts of defenses, max resists, block, evasion, spell supression, while also being able to fit like 7 gems worth of auras and defensive skills. This greatly hinders build diversity as some skills just can't function with a passive tree as broad as the meta builds. For instance, while I love righteous fire, it's passive defenses and life recovery with this build is actually insane. I can do most content without a life flask at all and mostly juice the maps up in SSFSC on T16 delirious and having the robot blasting every rare in sight while doing double essences and be mostly fine.

The point at which I'm trying to make is that the game should still have these systems, but players should be able to play around specific systems, regardless of their build and not by playing a particular build that just counters everything, then praying you don't get Bameth or some detonate dead mechanic, effigy, drought, or something obscenely rippy. I have two proposals.

The first proposal: Make stat breakpoints for pure energy shield, pure evasion, and pure armour builds.

What I mean by this, is when you have energy shield, and your "base amount" of energy shield, not from sources like "adds x% of life as es" meets a specific threshold of power, you gain something for it. Like ES would gain Elemental Ailment immunity. Evasion would gain something like crit damage avoidance. Armour would get bleed and corrupted blood immunity.

While those things could be topic for discussion, I think making it so that players who invest into one type of defensive attribute should be rewarded for their efforts and not punished for not playing hybrid and/or covering a grand scope of power.

My second proposal: Increase the rewards from Archnemesis mobs and make them only spawn with mods and rarity in maps according to the power of the map. Additionally, make map mods always include Archnemesis mods on the map itself.

This does a few things. The first, being that a white map, becomes significantly less rewarding as you no longer are encountering rare and magic monsters. You are simply doing the most basic map and getting significantly less exp and reward for doing easier content. Secondly, it makes it so only magic Archnemsis mobs spawn on blue maps. This also means that magic maps spawn magic Archnemesis mobs, while not being able to spawn rare Archnemesis mobs like rare quality maps. Additionally, you can remove some specific mods on maps themselves that are extremely rippy, if you want, and force all magic and rare maps to have Archnemesis mods on them.

Forcing mods to be on maps now changes the dynamic greatly. First off, it allows players to opt-in to the potential dangers of Archnemsis. Secondly, it assures the player that the map they're running will always have an Archnemsis modifier the player is opting into. It also creates a potential avenue to create new Archnemesis currency. This currency can "influence" a map, causing it to have more fire modifiers, or more life modifiers. While you cannot force what kinds of mod tiers you get in the map, you can make it so that the mod types are able to be rolled through special currency. This currency doesn't change the map's quality or rarity in any way, but when you roll a map, the map instead states, "Has rare monsters with Life modifiers". As an affix.

The key feature to this system, however, is allowing the player to really play around what their build can and cannot do. Players want to be able to take the build they're playing and do all, if not most, of the content, that is designed to be beaten. If more builds could feel safter in the mapping experience, more people would enjoy the game much more. Sure, the game needs difficulty, that difficulty should be opt-in, and when you opt-in for that difficulty, there should be rewards for it, but there's not. Players can jump into harvest and suddenly 5 of the harvest enemies are rare enemies with mods that counter yours, and suddenly, your build can't even play the game. Without any counter play, anything saying, "This rare F's you up", it just says, "surprise, you die." That is not exciting to the average player. That's just developers saying, go play a different game because the only thing that matters to us is you buying mtx.

I enjoy PoE, I enjoy feeling like I have ways to build a character and progress in the game, I wish there were better systems for SSF, but it's been fun. I just wish content in the game didn't punish a player for not playing a meta build or that it feels like you have ZERO counterplay vs mechanics. This isn't challenge this is just randomly walking around a corner, on completely safe mods only to die to a rare that steals flasks charges, possessed by a ghost that if you aren't stun/freeze immune, you just die to it, because it also freezes you every .1 seconds of an auto attack.

The other issue is that Rare and Magic monsters aren't rare or magic in rarity, they're literally like 2-3 of them every screen or every other screen. You just walk around a corner and suddenly you're fighting for your life (at earlier gear levels). Again, I have not had much problem with this system, but there are situations where it's literally, "whelp, i'm skipping that it just heals too much, while also having gigantic, hasted aura, magma barrier. Zero counter play, at all.

I was excited for this league to find rares and magics only having one mod. I was excited to feel like the sense of love and care for this game had returned to make the every day map experience great again. Only to find that hope ripped from me by having mobs with 6 different Archnem mods and it's literally no different from the old mods. Well, I can't say that, the big difference is you can see what the mob does now based on aura/animation. It doesn't help when it still just one shots you the same way. It forces people to play a specific way, it forces people to play specific builds, and it just sucks the fun out of playing the way you want, because the game just kills you without warning, and there still, after all these years isn't a death log, which, yes, is not the point of this thread.

Don't get it twisted, I'm loving the league, I'm loving the changes to the Atlas, I've been playing SSF lately, which I'm not used to having to craft and farm my own stuff, so that's been a fun. My complaint is that the difficulty spike of needing survivability to be able to do basic mapping then suddenly you need massive amounts of damage for bossing as well otherwise they wither you down, followed by random deaths from things you can't play around is sucking the fun from the game. Going into the league, I felt excited to farm early, build something I wanted to play, and swap. I no longer have that feeling. Why play anything else when the meta builds can just be tankier than other builds AND deal solid damage. There's no reason. When mods are this rippy, you're not rewarded for building differently, and the bosses are more challenging this league, why play anything else other than meta?

i wonder what would be your opinion if you actually played something less meta. or something more prone to AN mods disabling your build. RF esp with Aegis Aurora is rather 'dont care' playstyle where everything around you die and you shrug pretty much anything being thrown at you. dealing damage over time also makes you ignore stuff like Sentinells that can MURDER you if you stay for 3 secs in one place. from offscreen.

i ask this because the divide line between likers and not-likers pretty much follows the 'plays meta' and 'plays non-meta' line

im yet to hear from melee (Lightning Strike nor Flicker is melee FFS! first one is a ranged caster and second one never stands in place to take the hits) that they think 'it is fine'

im sure Sabo trappers, summoners, RF, DD, Ballista EA or Toxic Rain (for 11th league in a row) are having a 'good' time

but there are 180+ skills in the game and it is incredibly easy to pick one at random and explain why AN mods are pretty unfun if you opted to stay away from meta stuff (or they cost A LOT more to get rolling compared to meta)

"

sidtherat wrote:

i wonder what would be your opinion if you actually played something less meta. or something more prone to AN mods disabling your build. RF esp with Aegis Aurora is rather 'dont care' playstyle where everything around you die and you shrug pretty much anything being thrown at you. dealing damage over time also makes you ignore stuff like Sentinells that can MURDER you if you stay for 3 secs in one place. from offscreen.

i ask this because the divide line between likers and not-likers pretty much follows the 'plays meta' and 'plays non-meta' line

im yet to hear from melee (Lightning Strike nor Flicker is melee FFS! first one is a ranged caster and second one never stands in place to take the hits) that they think 'it is fine'

im sure Sabo trappers, summoners, RF, DD, Ballista EA or Toxic Rain (for 11th league in a row) are having a 'good' time

but there are 180+ skills in the game and it is incredibly easy to pick one at random and explain why AN mods are pretty unfun if you opted to stay away from meta stuff (or they cost A LOT more to get rolling compared to meta)

Meta summoners* ty not all of my minion builds are doing so great without using meta items/crafts that honestly make it an entirely diff build, cant speak for archnemesis which is too bad i enjoy these "the games too hard" leagues.

@op you right bout the insane defense stacking, i already had tons of layers and the recent patches have shown me i now have to get spell supression if i want to stand a chance and i've ba rely got room for that.

I have had several leagues in the past where I didn't start meta and everytime a few weeks into the league, it just became, "Play something meta or don't progress", because of how powerful defenses and meta builds are. The issue isn't meta builds are op, or that other builds aren't strong, it's the issue that other builds that aren't as strong even with high investment in power give up so much just to be viable.

PoE used to feel like players geared themselves to become overpowered. Now days, the game just feels like you have to gear yourself to become viable. The grind system has changed so dramatically that I've lost interest in playing different things because I know it'll just be a worse experience in every way.

Why play builds that aren't meta when you can just be ele ailment immune, have max block, max spell block, max pain suppression, 75% evasion, 85% phys damage reduction, 10k life, 4k es, not counting vaal molten shell, and the high damage you can have with meta builds, do all content without breaking a sweat?

There's literally no reason to not play meta. It's not that the meta builds are op, it's that the game PUNISHES YOU for playing things that don't have those defenses. You're punished for playing builds that don't survive because there's zero counter play. You can't decided when a map will have rares that instantly gimp your build. You don't get to decide when you do this expedition suddenly a mob with Soul Eater just shows up and instantly one shots you because you killed all the small adds instantly so it's this giant monster that has a haste aura and soul eater that moves 10x your character speed and hits for 20k dmg every .2 seconds. There's nothing in expedition that tells you, "Hey this mob is Soul Eater by the way." NOTHING. You just die.

The problem with PoE isn't building characters to be strong enough, it's having situations where the devs pretty much say, "You die because when you walked around that corner, you should have expected a random flying goat that shoots nuclear missiles while rolling around on roller blades making everywhere it steps lava which, if you run, suddenly cuts off your oxygen supply, and as you lose your breath you now start randomly getting the covid virus because you didn't expect the flying goat to mutate into a giant spider that vomits out small tractor trailers that start doing wheelies on your face while making your toes turn into balloons, launching you into orbit and then having the Moon crash into you as you fly into space, creating a massive calamity causing the sun to explode into a tiny pieces, ending all life."

Yeah, sorry that I didn't expect that. I only opened a blue map with the only mod being, "Monsters take less elemental damage."

"

sidtherat wrote:

i wonder what would be your opinion if you actually played something less meta. or something more prone to AN mods disabling your build. RF esp with Aegis Aurora is rather 'dont care' playstyle where everything around you die and you shrug pretty much anything being thrown at you. dealing damage over time also makes you ignore stuff like Sentinells that can MURDER you if you stay for 3 secs in one place. from offscreen.

i ask this because the divide line between likers and not-likers pretty much follows the 'plays meta' and 'plays non-meta' line

im yet to hear from melee (Lightning Strike nor Flicker is melee FFS! first one is a ranged caster and second one never stands in place to take the hits) that they think 'it is fine'

im sure Sabo trappers, summoners, RF, DD, Ballista EA or Toxic Rain (for 11th league in a row) are having a 'good' time

but there are 180+ skills in the game and it is incredibly easy to pick one at random and explain why AN mods are pretty unfun if you opted to stay away from meta stuff (or they cost A LOT more to get rolling compared to meta)

I'm having a pretty good time so far with fp tornado, haven't got to red maps yet but it's as much as I can play. For that build the league feels pretty normal, haven't been dying much and I think the worst thing I ran into so far was the outlook boss with nasty map mods that I juiced with a sentinel without noticing that it was also possessed, that one took a while but it was doable.
Sure, tornado has that ramp-up window of several seconds where you're pretty vulnerable, but the silver lining is that I choose where that window is, and when. Once it's up and spinning I'm free as a bird, I can stand wherever and do whatever, a melee character has no such luxury.

Yeah, I don't think we'll see any honorable cleave or sweep aficionado sharing his exploits, those either left already or, heh, you know, respecced into toxic rain.