Why Ruthless is the best game for strange people like me (tl;dr at bot)

Hello

I want to start by saying I am a weird guy and normally I would not express myself in this way as I have anxiety.

However for the first time in a very long time something has come along that fills me with absolute joy and excitement. It calms my mind and brings me great peace.

I will explain specific details further on however to understand my thoughts I must try to express to you my point of view and why a mode like this would ever mean so much to anyone. I am very bad at articulating myself in writing so if things come across as sharp or odd I apologize I just suck at this. (I mean sharp as in like rude or cocky or something)


The best and most clear sample of this I can give you comes from a game called Rimworld. It is a simple enough game and you make your goals and set your own difficulty.

I have never played a forest map, only snow and sea ice. I played desert once and it was fun but not difficult. I absolutely adore dropping into a map with nothing. Naked and HANGRY, I loved knowing that despite any amount of possible knowledge you could have...sometimes...it's just not possible.

You need the right conditions to survive naked in a world where as soon as the game starts, your character has 1% hypothermia. You need enough hares on the map, and a solid position geyser. I have not played for years so I am sure there are new/better strategies but when I played you had to wall in a geyser and remove 1 roof. You have solved the cold...sort of. The room will overheat and then get cold over and over and this makes your character ANGRY.

You must ignore this and pray to RNG it does not drop because they stubbed their toe or something because the run will be over.

If you have no hares on the map...

the run is over

No geyser you can "secure" quickly?

the run is over.

I could go on but I think that covers it. There is something absolutely thrilling and joyful about finally landing the scenario that turns an impossible run into almost impossible. Knowing you have 100 more almost impossible steps to go...

and then maybe...this could be the run

I love games and I love path of exile. The best thing about PoE is you can play the game YOUR WAY. You can trade, you can ssf...you can hardcore...now you can ruthless.

I love path of exile for the absolutely hilarious and brilliant character creation. There is so much jank in this game that I no longer felt interested in playing Magic the Gathering.

I love the grind, the slog...I love seeing more and more things stacked against me and then trying to get through it...

with the most jankiest shit possible


Ruthless provides not simply a new game mode but an entirely brand new stand alone game.

I have played Ruthless every single day this league and there is a real chance this could be the first league ever I play 2 months or maybe....3?

This is not path of exile. Do not come into Ruthless looking for it because it is not here.

If you keep your mind open and experience Ruthless as it's own game..

If you are an older player, D2....D1?

If you allow yourself to be open minded and see through the Path of Exile coat of paint...you will see something.

No gear...the struggle...

A blue item makes you excited? You were actually LOOKING for that white item...

Is that...is that a support gem?

This item gives more life...but this gives 15% rarity...

I have played path of exile since Talisman league and not once in my probably 6k+ hours if not more have I ever given a single mcf*** about rarity.

Everytime I drop an item with high rarity I get excited af. It is amazing.

Ruthless is it's own game and I wish I was given the ability to write well so that I could express to you how and why this game brings me so much joy.


Even if you are a newer player

Maybe this sounds tedious or annoying and honestly it can be

even if you love it, this can suck ***** sometimes. I know it sounds cliché or stupid but getting through all the garbage and piecing together something amazing and eventually dominating is absolutely wonderful.

I can't make you feel what I feel so I am going to try and express it the only way I can and that is poorly constructed sentences and paragraphs.

When it finally happens, you reach that point where you are secure. You have overcome and slogged through all the garbage, peeled back your rage and pushed on through the boredom.

Finally you feel it

for me it feels as if my mind is slowly opening and the jagged ends wiggling up at the sky

Then I feel the pieces...one by one

all of them lining up, even though many are missing I can see where they go and how it will look.

I must first figure out what those pieces are, I see what they must be but I do not know what they are. Then I must learn how to get them and then..

I have to go get them

I love Ruthless and I have so many things I would love to see, sure it needs some adjusting and fixing but that's good. Watch Ruthless grow.

For me it is already my favorite game, Escape from Tarkov is wiping soon and I am going to skip it completely. I could not care less.

I dream of jank

I dream of jank in ruthless

I will jank or I will die farming


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TL;DR

Ruthless is it's own stand alone game if you are willing to go into it with an open mind. It is fun, challenging and EXTREMELY rewarding. It will challenge you and push you to become a better player.

Dear wallsh1,

Thank you for your words! I feel the same way about Ruthless.

When I first read the announcement, I got very excited and couldn't wait for the new league to start. I was planning to raise one character in the normal mode of Sanctum League and one in Ruthless Mode.
I didn't miss a league since Legion in 2019, though I never got past T12 maps because I'm a casual player and I never followed a certain build, but let my char evolve. I chose skills because I liked how they look. Try and error was my strategy, and my builds slowly became better, which made me a bit proud every time something worked better than the league before. So I had a good time without ever complaining about changes in Updates, because I enjoyed the variation every three months.

But when I began playing Ruthless, it caught me immediately. It is so much more than I expected it to be. It thrills me that something as simple as "very much less loot" affects the game so much.

This mode opened a door to something special. Playing and loving Ruthless feels like being part of a secret society. It gives me shivers.

I already said it in nearly the same words in another thread, but I fear it got lost (it was some pages of threads ago and nobody replied), but it means a lot to me, so I'll say it again:

To me it feels like PoE was always meant to be played this way.
Everything goes together and makes sense now. Like parts of a puzzle that make a beautiful picture when put together in the right way, or a piece of music that only sounds good when heard at the right speed.

There has been put so much work and effort in the details, but often they are ignored. NPCs all have their individual personality, voice, accents and appalling biography. There are people who do Roleplay in PoE.
People think they run through the story because it's boring - but actually it is the other way round: it's boring because they run through.

Now in Ruthless Mode fights take long enough to really have a look at the design of monsters and their skills, the environment, the appearance of my character and the words my character is saying during/after a fight.
The scarce loot slows the game down so much that all the obligation to get through fast falls off, because I can't anyway.

Thus I began to read the magnificent story text again - because now it matters. All that NPC gratitude after fighting a unique mob (we even didn't call them "bosses" because the fight was ridiculous) wasn't credible anymore in the normal game. Now I enjoy all the congratulations from the NPCs because I am actually a bit proud when I defeated a unique monster.
The quest rewards are real rewards, because they are mainly things I need and not only the next thing to sell to the vendor. Even if I sell them, the currency I get in exchange is valuable because it's scarce.

Next thing is, I find it easier than I expected. I am dying less often than I thought I would, because at certain points my level is much higher than it would be in the normal game, so I have more passive skill points by then.

Also I can't just follow a canned build (which I didn't do anyway). I am forced to improvise, be creative and leave the comfort zone of a well known starter build that just works. Necessity begets ingenuity. This makes it varied and exciting for me even if I've run the same area many times before in the past leagues. I end up with a chaotic mixture of armour and skills in my inventory that I need to get to work together somehow, and I'm searching normal and magic rarity items to find something that suits my provisional plan. I am playing skill gems I never played before, because they're the only thing I have, and might even like them (or be glad when I can replace them). To succeed you need to understand how the defense works, what the stats do and how to handle certain monster mechanics. I think I will learn a lot from that.


I'm half laughing, half crying about all those hate comments on steam from players that want the game to be easier and claiming no one would play or even like Ruthless mode. They are mistaken. Those who really love the gameplay and concept of PoE are just not as loud. They enjoy more quietly, but they are much more numerous than the haters might assume.

GGG really should cite this as the ultimate 'jank: it's a feature!' endorsement.

And you are far too hard on yourself, OP: you came across as neither cocky nor odd. I was particularly fond of 'McFuck' and think we need to see more people not give one.

I do find it interesting that a side project, a spare-time effort by some senior devs that actively removes content from the game, is being better received by long-time POE players than a league that likely took much longer and far more resources to create and adds a whole new mode of play.

It's almost like, I dunno, call me crazy (even though I just read you), but...maybe 'more' isn't always 'better'. I KNOW WHODATHUNK BUT THERE IT IS. My completely original hot take on PoE2022.

#KISS #JustExileThings #IYKYK #Blessed

Ruthless is pathofexile cause most mechanics and in game elements only make sense with spare loot.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

GGG really should cite this as the ultimate 'jank: it's a feature!' endorsement.

And you are far too hard on yourself, OP: you came across as neither cocky nor odd. I was particularly fond of 'McFuck' and think we need to see more people not give one.

I do find it interesting that a side project, a spare-time effort by some senior devs that actively removes content from the game, is being better received by long-time POE players than a league that likely took much longer and far more resources to create and adds a whole new mode of play.

It's almost like, I dunno, call me crazy (even though I just read you), but...maybe 'more' isn't always 'better'. I KNOW WHODATHUNK BUT THERE IT IS. My completely original hot take on PoE2022.

#KISS #JustExileThings #IYKYK #Blessed

Agreed.

I too am enjoying Ruthless. It is challenging and entertaining for now. Not sure how engaging it will be going into the future for me but for now I'm having fun.

edit: I just found what I'd call a bug. About a half dozen white monsters attacked me. I'm using multiple attack skills like a regular Ruthless player has to do because we can't use many support skills. Anyway, Searing totem is one. I retreat a bit when getting swarmed and set up the totems. The monsters are all marked minion. Whenever a minion is killed it is immediately respawned. The only thing around me is the minions. I run back to where I started 5 or 6 screens and there is the main monster reviving minions. He's almost dead but was reviving his minions from 5 or 6 screens away! I killed him then went back the 5 or 6 screens and killed the minions. This time they stayed dead.

This bug probably hasn't been fixed yet because if I wasn't playing Ruthless the whole screen of monsters would have been dead when we first met up. :-D

I really loved Ruthless during the campaign, it was really epic, every boss fight was a challenge.

But in maps, it's starting to annoy me a bit.

My main problem is the content I have access to (tier 4-7) stopped being challenging. The maps are too easy, not much is going on in there because I cannot alch them, so they are not threatening, I'm not overgeared, but overleveled for these low maps.

I have "2.5 links" on my main two skills, I have usable auras, gear is still just resists plus a bit of life and utility. But the skilltree is endgame ready, so playing a t4 map with this gear is like playing a harmless t16 map with real gear.

All I can do now is grind, grind, grind (which is ok in terms of slow gear progression, it's cool for me to work like 10 more hours until I can annoint my horrible amulet).

But the threat and the epic fights are a thing of the past. I just run through useless mobs again, don't care what they look like or try to do, and just hope I find either maps, master missions or some rare league mechanic.

(guess I would favor more punishment in difficulty, but a slighty more friendly atlas tree. I want to run my horrible gear jugg into shaper guardian type fights and hit a brick wall until I make gear progression again)

yeah I'm exactly where you are ^

Ruthless SSF is by far the least challenging thing I have ever done in PoE and I've played it since the beginning.

All I do is play the same dozen of t3-t5 maps over and over, 0 challenge, 0 reward, 0 incentive to continue. I haven't payed less attention to what happens on the screen in any league ever.

I must have blown through a couple of hundred white maps by now, always juicing them best I can, investing all but a handful of points into straight up more map drops on the atlas tree etc. And rn I have two t3 maps left, after that I am back down to t2s again. 7 days into the league. The same maps I have done probably 20-30 times each by now whilst watching other things on the second monitor out of boredom.

Now I genuinely understand that this type of number tweaking isn't as easy as it might seem but map drops genuinely do need tweaking in ruthless. This isn't "ruthless", hard, difficult, challenging or rewarding.

All the other aspects of ruthless as in removal of mechanics, drop rates/rewards etc. are fun and fine. The mapping isn't. It is gating mechanic that is not tuned properly. I can't do difficult content because it is not available to me in game. So I have to only do easy content.

"

Peterlerock wrote:

I really loved Ruthless during the campaign, it was really epic, every boss fight was a challenge.

But in maps, it's starting to annoy me a bit.

My guess would be they focused almost entirely on retuning the campaign for Ruthless but with maps couldn't figure out how to maintain the challenge now that you'd acquired ten acts worth of gear. Which is okay because I suspect with such a dearth of resources, multiple playthroughs of the campaign on Ruthless are more enjoyable/engaging than in normal. Maybe, and this is just based on what I've seen and read, one way to approach it is to forget maps even exist and treat act 10 as the end of the game. Reach that, declare victory and start over from scratch to see what you find/use next time.

Regarding playing maps (PoE endgame) in Ruthless, my reading of the description of Ruthless by GGG was that they didn't really expect people to play many maps in Ruthless. It seems to be a mechanic targeted more for the storyline. What could be done to make it better for endgame?

"

Turtledove wrote:

What could be done to make it better for endgame?

I really like the Notables that are like "Maps have 10% chance to drop 1 tier higher, but all monsters gain 15% of phys as cold". There's 4 of them on the tree, but they are not enough in this non-drop environment.

Give us more of that.

They could try to add this stuff to the basic atlas points, but make them more rewarding. Like instead of "+1% map drop chance", make them "+x% map drop chance / pack size / chance to drop neighbour map, monsters gain x% increased damage/life/resists".

Would give me access to content, and make it harder at the same time.