Almost a month in and I already feel like stepping away for the rest of the league

1. Archnemesis enemies don't feel rewarding enough relative to the risk involved in fighting them, especially if mixed with league content.

Ever fought an AN mob with 3-4 mods plus 5+ essences on them? It's an exercise in frustration, especially as a summoner. Too many AoEs firing off, melting all of my minions I have to resummon repeatedly, plus the monster itself being a walking mountain of HP, all so I can get a handful of essences and nothing else.

When I can pull more out of a map boss, which is a lot easier to kill, I think that's a problem. No, GGG, this isn't me asking you to make map bosses worse by buffing them. Please stop making the game more needlessly difficult than it already is.

I think monsters should have a hard HP scaling cap equivalent to that of a standard mob with 4 AN mods.

11/16/22 EDIT:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3322245

I'm wary of these changes, but they still look promising. Diluting their mod pool should reduce the frequency of ridiculous mod combos resulting in certain encounters that are unwinnable or on par with aspirational bosses.

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2. The amount of gear investment required to comfortably play the game is becoming too high to be worth the effort anymore.

I can definitely feel the summoner nerfs and how their power is now frontloaded onto gear. I spent a good portion of this league so far, stuck in T8 maps, because enemies in higher tiers are way too strong (read above). Now after investing 10 divines, I can barely make T14 maps feel comfortable. And I say "barely", because technically my gearing is incomplete and now I have to play a glass cannon with 4k HP if I want to stay in red maps.

After a struggle, I managed to get two voidstones. I have yet to actually use them, because I literally can't afford to run higher tier maps that they would create. I feel like I'm trapped in yellow maps again, not because of map sustain which was a problem I haven't had to deal with in years since Metamorph league, but because I'm too poor to gear up. When I'm stuck running a small number of maps, because most are either too strong to run or too weak to get any kind of profit or fun, I get bored. And when I get bored, I quit, just like when I was stuck in T10 maps way back in the day, because sustaining red maps were impossible.

I've never been someone who can make divines hand over fist like some players. Summoners are ungodly slow compared to just about every other mapping build in the game, so income is very poor. Now that summoners are no longer a cheap and viable option for players on a low budget, I don't feel like I can enjoy this game anymore.

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3. The nerfs to everything has limited what I can do to make currency, making the gameplay and grind feel monotonous.

I'm not going to say I'm one of those crazy map juicers who always run T16+ maps with 100%+ IIQ, Delirium and scarabs with the intent on maximizing monster spawns. To this day, I'm still baffled as to how anyone actually makes profit running Beyond, when I've never seen them drop anything of value in all the years I've played.

However, given the nerfs to how looting works, the things one has access to for currency farm is now limited if you're not grouping up with other people. Exalt values have shifted to divine orbs, so now Harbinger is a waste of atlas passives.

With the nerfs to the archetype I tend to play and the cost needed to gear up properly, that means pinnacle bosses are also no longer available to me. Maven and invitations? Can't afford to gear up and fight those. Eldritch bosses? I'm already struggling to do T14 maps with what gear I can afford, there's no chance in hell I can reliably farm Exarch without feeling miserable about it. With how difficult AN mobs are, running Blight (one of my favorite leagues) is almost impossible unless you have outstanding levels of group clear (read: not a summoner). Metamorph league, another favorite of mine, is also impossible to run unless you can afford to make a build powerful enough to fight a superboss with 5+ AN mods, at which point, you'd be better off fighting pinnacle bosses because of how ridiculously they scale.

And then there are some which don't stand up on their own for currency farm. I've never heard of farming Abyss for 6-mod jewels being a viable strategy, nor 20 possessed rogue exiles, nor Betrayal anymore.

So that leaves me with a handful of options: Heist, Incursion, Essences, and Expedition. Heist is great for early league, but as everyone gets their hands on alt-quality gems, their value drops not long after launch. Incursion has the same issue, the value of temples with T3 gem rooms go down the further into a league you are as nobody needs to double-corrupt their gems. Essences reach their peak a short while after league start when people start crafting their endgame gear, but drop sharply after. Expedition is probably the only league I've listed here that remains a consistent source of currency from league start to finish, but relying on that alone probably isn't ideal. I also run Harvest on the side, but only because I need vivid life force to craft Facetor's Lenses to level up these cheap woke gems I got. Harvest is also a dead league that might only be good for selling life force.

This is how I've been running my maps. I do my Incursions until I run out of missions, collect contracts and blueprints, kill essence mobs, and hope I get lucky that an Expedition shows up since I'm running Stream of Conscious on my atlas tree. This is all I can do on T8 maps, and the monotony of it all combined with poor profit is starting to wear on me.

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I really don't want to quit since there's literally no other game that has summoning even remotely as good as this, but I just can't deal with the ever-increasing difficulty of PoE on multiple fronts.

I don't know what Chris's vision for the game is, but I wish he'd put it in hard mode where it belongs. For me, 3.13 was, is, and always will be, the peak of Path of Exile. Everything past that point, with all of the nerfs and stifling of build diversity, has just been a slow downward spiral.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

I really don't want to quit since there's literally no other game that has summoning even remotely as good as this

+1000 I'm seeing too many people who know what they're doing not having a good time and all i can think is that i was extraordinarily lucky this league, My experience isn't lining up and even one of my friends who never complains, complained.

He said to me: I'm Broke

Unlike me he does chaos recipes and all that fun stuff, I just herp-derp throwing dead body's around until a big shiny thing pops in front of me.

Last Epoch had decent minions but no Spectres, Gearing/Crafting was actually kind of fun but waiting on MultiPlayer to touch it again, It's not the same but i almost posted a thread here asking GGG to impliment some of their item concepts.

My own experience with minions is completely different - although Im mainly using temporary minions plus a few permanent ones in support roles.

Im aware that the notable "life from death" does help quite a bit, my permanent minions still did die a lot until I fixed their res and increased their max res.
The minion mastery for +8 max ele res plus elemental army did the trick for me plus switching from flesh to bone offering.

Now all my minions are sitting comfy at about 45% block, 10% regen, some leech and most importantly 87% ele res.
I havent lost a single minion since I made those changes, not even in otherwise rough encounters with massive degen AoEs involved like Sirus, Maven, Cortex or Uber Elder.


Id like to know what you did to get the results you described.
Im popping every essence monster Im encountering without any issues whatsoever and Im fully specced into essences on my atlas tree.
It cant be "life from death" alone, because the essence mobs usually die long before it kicks in and the healthbars of my spectres and AG dont even move.

I'm no stranger to taking leagues off early when I'm not having fun. This is the first league I've contemplated stepping away for longer, perhaps for good.

I don't trust GGG anymore, too many things were hidden from players, too many misleading messages, intentionally or not.

I don't see how they can resolve these issues by next league, let alone at all given what communication we have gotten. I don't think they understand how damaging this patch was to the game.

Have you tried doing Eldritch altars? Maybe the first league I am trying them and they feel good to be honest, things are dropping. I already have like 600c just from sextant drops. And the best part - you can do Eldritch altars + get influenced maps then combine them. So many mobs without using a single scarab, lol

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Have you tried doing Eldritch altars? Maybe the first league I am trying them and they feel good to be honest, things are dropping. I already have like 600c just from sextant drops. And the best part - you can do Eldritch altars + get influenced maps then combine them. So many mobs without using a single scarab, lol

What I would give to be first experiencing them like you and not have the knowledge of what they were like on their initial release.

Where the benefits were better, downsides less restrictive, and you could literally self-sustain scarabs with them. (At least rusted/polished) It was one of the funnest leagues in years.

Knew it was going to be nerfed, and rightfully so. But the endgame they were enabling doesn't even exist anymore, even if you buy the scarabs. The identity of the leagues, the monsters themselves, the rewards, all have been destroyed. Warped around Archnemesis until everything is this homogenous lifeless blob.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Have you tried doing Eldritch altars? Maybe the first league I am trying them and they feel good to be honest, things are dropping. I already have like 600c just from sextant drops. And the best part - you can do Eldritch altars + get influenced maps then combine them. So many mobs without using a single scarab, lol

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Now after investing 10 divines, I can barely make T14 maps feel comfortable. And I say "barely", because technically my gearing is incomplete and now I have to play a glass cannon with 4k HP if I want to stay in red maps.

If I'm having difficulty managing to comfortably tackle T14+ maps without dying a lot due to lack of investment and means of generating currency, I doubt that's going to get better by adding altars on top of everything else.

I generally see a league mechanic and decide if I go all in or not.

Lake looked okay, better than the last two league mechanics which I skipped.

Archnemesis = Scrapped together last minute because they were working on new end-game.
Sentinel = Reverse Torment with a skill tree. Wooo...

I was also lured by a half truth in the stream saying "Less but more meaningful rare enemies". Meanwhile I'm getting swarmed by 10 at a time as usual and they're made of paper again.

They literally said in the AN league stream it was a "light weight league because they were working on the new bosses" yet added it to core above far more deserving leagues.

My Prototype with phys cap gets one-shot by silent ghost lightning striders more times than I can count. They used to be much louder. I had 2 other builds but what's the point if another build just gets cheesed something else.

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BTW if you're having trouble generating currency then it's likely you invested into map based passives like Delirium, Blight, Legion, etc. I figured out real quick the trick was to invest in vendor item generation. Tuljin, Ritual, Heist (gems). These are independent of the nerfs to drop rates.

5 Divines from Ritual, 6 from Heist, 3 from Tuljin, 0 from map drops. ZERO

I feel u man... I have played PoE for about 8 years now and I have never felt this weak. once you enter red maps u just keep getting oneshot by prettymuch anything that touches you. feels like they balance the game around having insane gear, or they are just scaling every thing up just incase someone is wearing a mageblood...

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Orbaal wrote:

My own experience with minions is completely different - although Im mainly using temporary minions plus a few permanent ones in support roles.

Im aware that the notable "life from death" does help quite a bit, my permanent minions still did die a lot until I fixed their res and increased their max res.
The minion mastery for +8 max ele res plus elemental army did the trick for me plus switching from flesh to bone offering.

Now all my minions are sitting comfy at about 45% block, 10% regen, some leech and most importantly 87% ele res.
I havent lost a single minion since I made those changes, not even in otherwise rough encounters with massive degen AoEs involved like Sirus, Maven, Cortex or Uber Elder.


Id like to know what you did to get the results you described.
Im popping every essence monster Im encountering without any issues whatsoever and Im fully specced into essences on my atlas tree.
It cant be "life from death" alone, because the essence mobs usually die long before it kicks in and the healthbars of my spectres and AG dont even move.

Yup, those of us using permanent minions are really feeling the loss of more gem levels. Zombies are just a joke now - even with all the life nodes. And trying to dodge Uber elder and recasting them just isn’t fun.

Last league my zombies and specters rarely died. My AG was over a year old with decked out gear. Now they all just fold up like a cheap chair.

Moving minion buffs to gear is another issue, because that takes slots away from buffs for the player.

The life from death works great for SRS or other temp minions that have high numbers and a quick death. But that isn’t good for permanent minions. Even using skeletons isn’t great because they have a 20 sec uptime, not short enough to be beneficial in most fights.