The majority of players dont like hard content

Of course it was. You did the same thing over and over because it was the best way to improve your character. This league I did eldricth altars and succeeded. Then I did Maven invitations and succeeded. Not only both ways of playing the game were profitable, they were also vastly different - one focuses on juicing up maps with mobs and the other on beefed up 4-way fights. I didn't even try delving properly. Or bossing. Or Expeditions and Legions. All of them offer something different. So no, you have no right to call the game "mindless grind". Mindless grind was killing Mephisto over and over and over again in Diablo 2. We don't have this here.

Wrong context, if your objective is to improve your character by X in timeframe Y anything beyond that is mindless grind, especially if you prefer deterministic improvement rather than slot machine.

Ironically killing Mephisto is the perfect example, you've made the mistake of thinking that target farming essence is different to target farming abyss. Both produce currency for you to trade with and both drop items but both also are entirely reliant on the slot machine to produce what you want exactly like Mephisto.

This is probably because you are a currency focused player which makes the different avenues slightly different approaches to success, but if you are an iterative improvement player and/or dislike heavy trading what you want is reliable tangible ways to find upgrades and these are consistently removed.

For example in Sentinel I was trying to craft a tri-element dagger big enough to crutch a poison character. You can farm essences to do this but it could literally take thousands this isn't a satisfying objective to work towards instead you'd try and fracture it to minimise the odds then try again.

Farming those essences was 100% a mindless grind, don't care about anything thats going on just blasting as fast as possible to feed into a washing machine of crafting outcomes until I got what I want. Changing that to anything else doesn't improve that.

Basically you are wrong, its all mindless grinding we just enjoy parts of it differently and anything not grinding gets removed. Just don't pretend that killing monster X instead of Y is any different from just blasting mephisto as fast as possible its exactly the same content run in exactly the same way... Mindlessly :p

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Johny_Snow wrote:

So no, you have no right to call the game "mindless grind".

I will call it a mindless grind anyway, because it feels like a mindless grind to me. What are you going to do about it? Also, who decides whether I have the "right" to call it a mindless grind? You? What gives you the right to do so? ;)

Harvest didn't feel like a mindless grind because I did not have to do it for ages. Now, would it have been better to have more options? Sure. But having the option to not grind for ages was better than not having that option It took less time to build a successful character than it takes today. It was more fun. I could make a character, have fun with it, and then move to the next when it didn't feel like playing it anymore. Now, I get bored with the grind before it actually becomes fun. Which is why I currently do not play the game.

So I am wrong yet you refusing to use a readily-available mechanic which can cut down the mindless grind you chose to subject yourself to are right?

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Johny_Snow wrote:

So I am wrong yet you refusing to use a readily-available mechanic which can cut down the mindless grind you chose to subject yourself to are right?

I don't subject myself to mindless grind, I am currently not playing. Which is a lot more efficient than reducing it, I remove it completely.

Also, no, you are not wrong in not considering it mindless grind. Neither am I wrong in considering it a mindless grind. The question of whether something is mindless grind is very much a matter of opinion, not of fact, contrary to the question of whether 1+1 equals 2 (it does), whether the Earth orbits the Sun (it does - well technically, they orbit a common center of gravity), whether the Earth is flat (it is not), or whether climate change is man-made (it either is or it is not, we are not 100% sure, only ~99.999% sure). Other things, like whether you think dark chocolate tastes good, or whether Elon Musk is the sexiest man you've ever seen, or whether ice skating is fun, or whether PoE is too grindy, are opinions, and you are free to have your opinion, just as I am free to have mine. Luckily, as far as I can tell, neither of us live in a totalitarian state. Opinions and facts are not the same thing, there is an important distinction.

Telling me that I have no right to voice my opinion, on the other hand... that is a dangerous (and wrong, if you ask me) path to go down. Try to convince me, rather than tell me that I have no right to state my opinion. So far, to be honest, you have not convinced me.



...except for the dark chocolate thing of course. It is just a fact of nature that dark chocolate is superior to milk chocolate ;).

Nothing about PoE is hard.
There is no Skill play.

you can click to move.
you click to go pew pew
you spam potions.

You just hit the end of the "Skill" options.

Wow he sure clicks well!!
Thats so damn fine clickin if i ever saw it.!

The funniest part is the get gud ... at what ..
running in circles?
Stop and start shooting ... stutter step ?

Its not difficult
it's unfair , hard to see , poorly implemented.
but not hard.

People just don't like crappy game mechanics.
Cause that same mouse pointer you use to move .
Is the one you are supposed to hold still over the mobs head to be able to tell
what it is .. to avoid the one shot you take for ... standing still..

Wrong...

But I only like smooth linear difficulty curves, none of this asymptotic insanity

I don't like easy content, but I played PoE for the ability to make my character into a god, and then I guess content becomes easier. Now it feels in PoE you get weaker and weaker. There is little point to doing anything because the power progression is boring and the same for pretty much every character.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Of course it was. You did the same thing over and over because it was the best way to improve your character. This league I did eldricth altars and succeeded. Then I did Maven invitations and succeeded. Not only both ways of playing the game were profitable, they were also vastly different - one focuses on juicing up maps with mobs and the other on beefed up 4-way fights. I didn't even try delving properly. Or bossing. Or Expeditions and Legions. All of them offer something different. So no, you have no right to call the game "mindless grind". Mindless grind was killing Mephisto over and over and over again in Diablo 2. We don't have this here.

I think you are missunderstanding what he means by mindless grind. Having slightly different things to farm, i.e different leage mechanics and/or Eater/Exarch/Maven has nothing to do with whether it's a mindless grind or not.

Something is mindless if you don't have to think about it, something that can be said about prety much all non-aspirational content in POE and depending on your gear even for the aspirational content. POEs complexity is not in it's game play but in the steps you have to master before the game play, i.e build making.

As for whether something is grindy or not solely depends on the amount of repetition and the rewards you get from it. Harvest never felt grindy because you got visible progress in relatively short time that kept you motivated. Right now pretty much anything you do feels like a waste of time because hardly anything drops that you can use yourself.
At best you can sell a bunch of small stuff (with the process of selling being an even worse grind) to make a steady income which can then be used to buy the stuff you want. However, this way of progress is inherently bad/unfun for many people and the more these people have to do it there worse it feels for them. And with the constant increase in difficulty and the also constant decline in rewards since 3.15 many people have reached a level where they no longer consider it worthwhile.

I would argue that it's a relatively small vocal minority that don't want the game to present a challenge. Players who enjoy the game aren't going to come here (or other websites) to complain about it, so their opinions aren't necessarily being reflected in the current discourse.

Also - "hard" is a completely subjective term. I see this often where people complain that "x" mechanic is too hard to overcome, but there are literally serval character building options to deal with said mechanic. The challenge in POE is learning what those options are and how to best implement them in an efficient manner.