Has it always been this difficult?

I skipped the last few seasons and decided to come back for this one but…… I don’t remember the act 1 enemies being so difficult? Is it just me? Faced my first pack of blues and got completely stomped and had to kite for what seemed like the time to kill a boss. Did they change something?

Nah, they buffed the act 1 monsters a few leagues back. They haven't really buffed the other acts, so once you get through act 1, it's pretty much a breeze from there.

Nope. During the last year they made Act 1 harder (maybe Act 2 too - don't remember), buffed rare monsters in general and nerfed player power several times.

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Phrazz wrote:

Nah, they buffed the act 1 monsters a few leagues back. They haven't really buffed the other acts, so once you get through act 1, it's pretty much a breeze from there.

They stopped buffing beyond Act 1 because they realized how stupid that idea was. It is mind boggling that they put any ressources into making the leveling less enjoyable. But at least Chris Wilson had some good laughs watching employees fighting Brutus for the first time after the rework. It was just for some troll moments to the enjoyment of the CEO.

The smart decision would be to revert the Act 1 changes for the sake of winning new players but that would again cost development ressources. So they are doing the lazy approach of not touching Act 1 again and the other acts, because 'POE 2 will fix this'.

They decided to replace the old magic and rare monster modifiers with what they introduced in archnemesis league.

They were fine for a final pick your own boss fight, but have not integrated too well as random rares (and magics too I believe).

These days the rares are more often more dangerous than the map boss, tho still not quite pinnacle boss level.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

They decided to replace the old magic and rare monster modifiers with what they introduced in archnemesis league.

They were fine for a final pick your own boss fight, but have not integrated too well as random rares (and magics too I believe).

These days the rares are more often more dangerous than the map boss, tho still not quite pinnacle boss level.

It is not just rares. They changed monster KI and damage, especially on Rhoas, Goat men and the Tidal Island boss. They also got Brutus out of the boss room to implement a 'walk of shame' if you die to him. Newer players have a harder time to throw their bodies at him, because they have to walk a longer distance after death.

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Xhexstrom wrote:

I skipped the last few seasons and decided to come back for this one but…… I don’t remember the act 1 enemies being so difficult? Is it just me? Faced my first pack of blues and got completely stomped and had to kite for what seemed like the time to kill a boss. Did they change something?

Yes, and that second post knows it. It's called archnemesis mods. Last season they changed all the mods on the monsters and now a lot of them have what are called archnemesis mods. These are a LOT harder than the old mods and they can be absurdly ridiculous, especially Gargantuan and Sentinel mods. As you might notice monsters with these tags are much larger. It's always especially fun <- /sarcasm getting a pack of Roa's in the mud flats with one of these two.

Anyway archnemesis mods are hated by most people and IMO it should be a rollable map mod only. They just suck the fun out of the game for me, so I hate them. It's kind of funny, because most streamers who said 'everything was fine after a few weeks of playing Sentinel league', but now that they had to start over with no gear to help them are suddenly discovering how bad Archnemisis mods are once again. Streamers that said everything was good after GGG's nerfed Archnemesis mods last league (yes they were a lot harder last league) are totally avoiding the new league mechanic now. This is because of how hard and dangerous it is while not being rewarding enough to do them.

Interesting. So, they messed around with the difficulty of act 1 and before getting to the rest of the acts, realized it was too much so never bothered with the rest of the game but left act 1 in this weird state, while these new archnemesis mods compound the issue. At least it’s not just me then. It was a bit disheartening dying a few times in a area where I know for a fact I had no problem in the past.

Honestly I can’t think of another game where the devs made the *beginning* of the game more difficult after adding more content. Could you imagine if a game like Final Fantasy 14 made the early game more difficult after adding expansions? Such a strange business decision, it’s like they *want* to make it more difficult for new players to get hooked into the game

Actually now that I think of it, this reminds me of when I first played this game back before actual release, when the normal rhoas would kill you in 1 to 2 hits lol. You’d think they’d want to avoid that

Act 1 to 10 are still easy, compared to maps, where the difficulty is ramping up way faster, because arch nemesis is more broken there.

Like OP, I've come back after missing a couple seasons, and whilst most of the campaign went as expected, I did get the odd monster pack that gave me some real problems.

The latest was at the end of Act six, on the beach just before the Brine King. Was tootling along, then whilst fighting a fairly large pack, blam, I'm dead. Thinking it must have been a one off I respawned and found the pack again, blam, I'm dead again? Third time I took my time and tried to assess the pack from a distance - right in the middle of the pack were about 4 rare rock golems, each with the resist fire modifier - which was a bit of a problem as I was a completely fire based character. I soon learnt that "resist fire" should be renamed to "immune to fire". In the end I had to chip them down with frost blink, and that took blimin ages. Absolutely no fun at all.

If I'm getting archnemisis mods on rares this early, I'm not sure I want to go all the way to mapping.