Can't find motivation to play leagues, what do ?

Ever since the 3.15 nerfs i've only played leagues until early red maps and then lost all motivation to push forward. Mostly becuase i don't like the slow character progression and having to play hours and hours before i can comfortably farm the endgame. Hence why i just play standard, where i can hop on my characters that i've been working on for multiple leagues and just farm away at the speed i like.

I can't understand why the acts were made harder and why the lead devs are trying to turn this game into what they want poe 2 to be. I think its a huge gamble because they are living off the success of poe 1 and are slowly turning it into a game with a completely different pace and playstyle, dropping off the players that play poe purely for what it has been in the past: a fast paced crazy arpg about experimenting with builds.

That is slowly getting less and less, the 3.15 support gem nerfs left alot of builds in the dust and their fate has now been sealed with the AN mod rework. What was good at mapping but bad at bossing is not bad at mapping too and it feels like an absolute slog to play some of these builds due to rares having huge amounts of health to the point where even my min-maxed standard characters take a long time to kill an essence, forcing this slow playstyle on me.

I know you can invest alot of currency into a build and make them faster but to do that you absolutely need to have fun otherwise you will not run as many maps, farm currency and improve the build to that point. If a build requires high investment just to reach the endgame you have to force yourself through the bad parts. Now to me it seems in league with some builds there are almost only bad parts and the endgame is a soul crushing amount of grind away, leaving me demotivated to play and try builds at all.

There are meta builds that require less gear and can progress at a faster pace but thats kinda boring to me. I like experimenting with new stuff like back when ultimatum vaal items were released.



I'm really nostalgic for the days when there were easily accessible and broken builds like vaal ground slam, HOA BV, Herald Stacking, Archmage MoM anything and such. Whole screens exploding while running mirrored fractured maps (back when the deli performance was fixed for like one league with vulcan)

Anyways, the kind of gameplay i'm looking for i find in standard and i have the motivation to grind there because the characters i have are fast and i don't need to progress through the atlas and the early itemization again and again. i can experiment with builds freely without having to invest hundreds of hours into each build, dont need to play through the acts over and over.

i can just conclude that i'm either too spoiled by the power creep that used to be in the game and is now legacy in standard, or i'm simply not the target audience for this game anymore because league gameplay has been slowed to a grinding halt to match the vision of what they want poe 2 to me and that just isn't fun to me.

Maybe i'm just bad at the game, who knows.

I have no idea how to get motivated to play leagues again and i really want to have fun in leagues again. Man...

While I actually think that "the great purge" that was 3.15 was actually needed because of years of power creep, it would only reach its balance potential if they actually followed up by improving underused skills and archetypes. Because while A LOT of skills needed to be jacked down a bit, 3.15 hurt skills that were already average the most.

The game in its current state is a double edged sword; while I can't have fun in a game where "everything goes", and you're always "on top", it's also hard to have fun playing builds/skills that you know you'll have to sink 50+ ex into to be "playable" in endgame. It is never fun KNOWING you'll put a handicap on yourself by choosing skills X.

I'm expecting some major balancing of underused skills in the coming league. Sadly, I don't think they will match my expectations.

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Phrazz wrote:

While I actually think that "the great purge" that was 3.15 was actually needed because of years of power creep, it would only reach its balance potential if they actually followed up by improving underused skills and archetypes. Because while A LOT of skills needed to be jacked down a bit, 3.15 hurt skills that were already average the most.

The game in its current state is a double edged sword; while I can't have fun in a game where "everything goes", and you're always "on top", it's also hard to have fun playing builds/skills that you know you'll have to sink 50+ ex into to be "playable" in endgame. It is never fun KNOWING you'll put a handicap on yourself by choosing skills X.

I'm expecting some major balancing of underused skills in the coming league. Sadly, I don't think they will match my expectations.

I will bring up Morrowind here. Morrowind was my first TES game and I naturally adore it from a nostolgic perspective.

In Morrowind you could literally train jumping until you could jump from town to town like Superman.

No other TES game to my knowledge allowed for that potential. As a consequence they weren't as good.

If PoE loses its screen clearing potential it will suffer as a consequence. People play games to do what they can't do IRL. Never forget that.

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Izrakhan wrote:

In Morrowind you could literally train jumping until you could jump from town to town like Superman.

No other TES game to my knowledge allowed for that potential. As a consequence they weren't as good.

If PoE loses its screen clearing potential it will suffer as a consequence. People play games to do what they can't do IRL. Never forget that.

Well, you could train your acrobatics in Oblivion too pretty high, but not to that degree. I mean, we're on two different planets here, though, as "jumping" was an important factor as to why Oblivion and Skyrim were worse than Morrowind. Sure, I agree that Morrowind was better, but it had nothing to do with jumping :P

PoE will always be clear speed driven. Sure, they might regulate it down a notch when PoE 2 comes, but nothing drastic.

Oblivion was a representation of the great dumbing down when a series switched from PC to Console :p, you couldn't do anything In Oblivion that you could do in Morrowind really.

I'm sadly only half joking too, development priorities shifted significantly and really they've never come back, the degree of player freedom in Morrowind is fantastic I'll struggle to come up with a better title.

Random comments about that aside I really agree with Phrazz, I thought 3.15 was necessary and the game desperately needed it but to put it simply they fucked it up by trying to do the biggest set of changes in the shortest time frame (or so it seems to me)

It absolutely crushed build options and we got a few back with the defensive buffs but i'd still describe the overall game state as worse than 3.14/3.13. The nerfs were supposed to be for a purpose I feel like we've creeped straight back to those values already.

As to OP's question only two options, find a strong motivator in a league or simply don't play leagues. I only keep my interest for example because I play HC and I don't clear all the bosses every league, I experiment with builds with the goal of finding one i'm confident of killing all the bosses with and then doing so.

When I play without that framework I just don't have fun its what works for me, you have to find a similar one that works for you and if you can't its simple. Play something else :p

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Phrazz wrote:

PoE will always be clear speed driven. Sure, they might regulate it down a notch when PoE 2 comes, but nothing drastic.

I don't know what you mean by nothing drastic. Many builds lost more than half of their power since 3.14. To the degree they just aren't viable for clearing mechanics.

GGG has an idea that the game should be very "challenging" whereby mobs can one shot you and it takes you ten minutes to drop them. Maybe I'm being hyperbolic but that game design is crap. That's WoW design. See how long they can stay awake and avoid mechanics. I was over that in my 20s.

I play games I think are challenging but with the handicaps I want. Such as FO4 with the realistic damage mod. Or horizon with the crafting stuff. Or terraria large world mastermode hardcore.

What GGG did is akin to Bethedsa going into TES and saying "We don't want people jumping from town to town." It's stupid. Play the game you want. When the game is more tolerant of more builds players have more choice to play with the handicaps they want.

This is why 3.14 was a better PoE than anything after it.

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impulze3 wrote:

having to play hours and hours before i can comfortably farm the endgame.

I don't like this take at all. I neither agree nor understand this mindset. What's wrong with character power taking ''long'' to attain ? It's supposed to take long, it's a grind ARPG.

You're asking for the endgame and extreme character power to be easily reachable. But the grind is part of these kind of games, make things (items/power/etc) too easily available and you will also see people's interest disappear. Basic Game Design 101.

Man Path of Exile is supposed to be hard, yet the game has become too easy now and people still whine. Maybe you should play another game, in all seriousness.

I always think "slow character progression" is just in comparison to 3.14, because way back it was way hardee than it is nowadays. I stressed this before - if you're able to farm t16 comfortably with nothing but a naked character with tabula I can't see that as something good. That doesn't mean it's slow per se. Im already deep in leaguestart testing for 3.19 and so far 2 chars I've managed to build clear t15 maps on a 5link, after 7 hours of gameplay, with level 80, with just a few chaos of investment.

And no, those are both off meta and not your current strongest builds. I mean, what more do you want? Go and train the campaign so it takes 4.5 hours instead of 10 and you cut down the most annoying part by more than 50%.

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Phrazz wrote:

it's also hard to have fun playing builds/skills that you know you'll have to sink 50+ ex into to be "playable" in endgame. It is never fun KNOWING you'll put a handicap on yourself by choosing skills X.

easily solvable: just buff all skills and hard cap the overall damage output of a player to the point that he can barely beat the endboss,
problem solved, all skills are equally viable.

or is the problem in fact that even after a rebalance you can slap all skills into PoB and find out the ones with the lowest damage in one hour and call them "not viable" (like: can't oneshot the endboss or where ever this "viability race" ends)?

imho: "not knowing the options you had with skill optimisation" has ever been the fun part and ggg will have to overhaul their whole skill gem architecture to make tools like PoB impossible and reinstate the original game they once had.

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vio wrote:

easily solvable: just buff all skills and hard cap the overall damage output of a player to the point that he can barely beat the endboss,
problem solved, all skills are equally viable.

or is the problem in fact that even after a rebalance you can slap all skills into PoB and find out the ones with the lowest damage in one hour and call them "not viable" (like: can't oneshot the endboss or where ever this "viability race" ends)?

imho: "not knowing the options you had with skill optimisation" has ever been the fun part and ggg will have to overhaul their whole skill gem architecture to make tools like PoB impossible and reinstate the original game they once had.

offtopic, the solution

gems could get a internal, hidden damage multiplier which isn't shown to players or tools but can only be estimated roughly by playing it in the game

"Just" buff all 200+ skills that are underwhelming? It's not the first time I've seen strange use of the word "just" in here. Maybe it's just my poor English...

"Hidden mods" would be data mined and implemented into PoB in a matter of seconds. The main problem isn't PoB, even though it does provide some problems. The problem is that some skills are forgotten. Not cared about anymore by GGG. What PoB does, is just show you - before you've played 50 hours on a character - that you will be wasting your time picking this skill, if "beating all content" is your goal.

A "hard cap" would be MASSIVELY unpopular - and VERY hard to do on all skills, with so many moving parts. Even WITH a hard cap; the only thing it would do, is help the skills that can actually reach that high cap easily, making those builds capable of just dumping loads of points into defense. And the fact that there is no hard cap/ceiling, is the main reason why players "keep going". Keep farming. Keep crafting. Keep min/maxing.

Nah, what the game needs, is a massive overhaul of "bad skills" and bad archetypes. But it's not "just" to do. It's not something that is achieved in one patch. Hell, I don't think they could do it in three patches; that's how bad things are.

So it's easier to just keep them forgotten - and never talk about them, like GGG currently are doing.