Ruthless is the easiest game mode, even more so than standard.

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moonretealoud wrote:

About sustain maps. You have several different league mechanics besides maps. You have Kirak selling maps and offering missions. You have an atlas tree.
If you're left without maps, it's probably your fault, because it's a resource that needs to be spent wisely.

I've finally made it to reds, but it was a real struggle. The atlas tree right now is a gigantic noob trap, and I fell for it. Without taking all 4 shaping nodes your chances of success in ssf seem pretty grim, along with the kirac nodes. And as you said engaging with all the league content regardless of it you want to or not. And there's a whole shitshow right now about the current league being a disaster not just for ruthless. I've tried to get good at it, but I've come to the conclusion that i don't have to dps to even pretend to start engaging with it without movement skills to fall back on.

Talking about accessibility in a niche game mode like this is probably going to anger most people, but I believe A LOT of people are going to get filtered when they cant get out of white maps because they don't know, that 95% of the atlas tree early on a death sentence, and that they actually do have to engage with league content and not just mapping whether they like it or not.

Most people just want to turn off their brain, grind maps, and collect loot. Ruthless isn't going to hold on to enough players if maps don't come easier to the average player here, which is still much MUCH above average for most of PoE. I'm sure it will hold onto a fanbase, but enough to justify a main page league instead of a private one? When people are already making fun of the league for having lvl 1 players on the ladder a week in.

Ruthless has been out for a week and people in SSF has killed Maven already. I think the progression is not too slow at all. In fact I think they need to nerf the amount of rare drops.

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arknath wrote:

Ruthless has been out for a week and people in SSF has killed Maven already. I think the progression is not too slow at all. In fact I think they need to nerf the amount of rare drops.

We both play Ruthless apparently. That makes us both masochists. Your suggestion seems to show a very nice streak of sadistic inclinations that goes along with your masochism though. :-)

A week and SSFers have hit red maps/true end-game already. Hang on, let me just dig something up here...

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Ruthless is a mode that re-imagines traditional understanding of where Path of Exile's endgame is. It redefines the entire game as the endgame. Even reaching higher campaign acts, let alone maps, is an achievement.

and

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Ruthless is a mode where your progression matters a lot at all stages of your playthrough, whether you're early in Act One, struggling to get past Kitava, just entering maps or even if you've somehow made your way all the way to red maps.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3320651

Stresses mine.

'Somehow', they say, as though it's a mystery or unlikely outcome that anyone might enter red maps.

And it took SSFers less than a week.

I can't believe, after doing it vocally and brazenly for years, GGG went and vocally and brazenly overrestimated their ability to make anything difficult for those players determined to prove them wrong. It's one thing to say you want the whole game to feel like end-game and another altogether to achieve that, and no mere retooling of the numbers is going to cut it.

I made it three whole zones in act 1 before realising how out of touch GGG are with the very idea of 'endgame', either their own or any other game's. Just because your actual endgame is marked by one sort of tedium for those who crack its code, that doesn't mean adding a different sort of tedium to your early game makes it feel like that endgame. And it certainly doesn't feel like any other endgame I've played. Ruthless...I guess, but I could come up with more accurate adjectives. I'll leave it at that.

I didn't find it easy or hard. I found just the same overcooked PoE, only cut up into smaller bites as though that makes the bitter taste of the charcoal any less off-putting.

edit: found this gem too. Same source.

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High level characters and good rare items infer immense bragging rights.

1. pretty sure they mean 'confer', since 'inferring' is not something high level characters or good rare items can do, since they're incapable of deducing or concluding anything; 'conferring', however, is the act of bestowing or giving;

2. And even if it is 'confer', I don't see many people bragging about it, because too many people are already doing it. Hard to brag about something that is fairly common.

Just yikes all round.

edit: eh, that was a bad typo. Chalking it up to posting 4/5ths asleep.

yeah, people were saying itll be too hard, impossible without their vendor recipes etc. i tried pointing out that they were killing act bosses in 3 seconds, and that if they ended up with 1/10 of their usual damage due to no good weapon, support gems or auras they would still kill the act bosses in 30 seconds, where it used to take people maybe 10+ minutes back in the day but they still beat the boss and progressed, it wasnt considered impossible just because it took more than 3 seconds.


i think theres a real disconnect with just how powerful characters are now, when people are crying about nerfs, crying about having their harvest item printer taken away, crying about not having to filer out 50 rare items every map... i saw a vid with empys group, much love to empy, but they were crying about how ggg ruined the game because in a usual map run of the sort they do they would find at least 2 of the rarest tier of uniques in the game like mageblood, hh etc, and now they dont even fill their bags (because the loot that actually drops that is more than 10 players could carry out in their bags has all been filtered out probably).

theres so much sadface from the community about nerfs but the reality is we are buffed so hard right now that even when u are wearing mostly blue and white items with 0 support gems or auras you still just faceroll most of the campaign and actually levelling to maps is quicker than it was in 2013, and the maps are easier than they were in 2013, everyone visible whos done ruthless ive looked at on youtubes and streams etc were 20 hours in an grinding mid tier maps, walking through them with no real struggles.




its nearly 10 years now since HvR hit world first lvl100, playing in an organised group focused on getting him to 100, and it took them 4 months. he recently uploaded a vid to youtube of a lvl100 push in an organised group presumably last league.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QmTUQbfdok

he hits lvl100 in 1 hour and 1 minute.


thats where we are at now with the main game, that was actually possible last league if u really wanted to pull out all the stops. the characters lvl100 with something like 50 minutes /played, its full meme mode.

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arknath wrote:

Ruthless has been out for a week and people in SSF has killed Maven already. I think the progression is not too slow at all. In fact I think they need to nerf the amount of rare drops.

This goes to other posts after this as well. But people have to realize not everyone plays at the same pace. I started playing again on Thursday? and I just touched red maps Sunday morning. That's shouldn't be held as a standard, I played 10 hours a fucking day, and im sure the guy who did maven has done that since day 1, and is probably a even better/more knowledge player than me.

Most people in ruthless are still doing acts if global chat or the ladder is any measure. You cant judge how easy a league is based on poopsockers and people with 5k hours in the game. And you certainly can't balance around them.

This whole thread is also not even really about progression, but the fact that holding more difficult CONTENT hostage from players that are very much so ready to tackle it is bad design. If all I wanted to do was grind mindlessly forever one shotting mobs that pose no threat to me at all I'd go back to black desert online.

Kind of a weird flex given endgame BDO is all about PvP.

I suppose it's true that until it is, it's a fun little mobstomp. Pretty too. What an astoundingly cool cosmetic/character design system it has.

A shame pretty much all of it costs something, but eh, aesthetically rapturous Korean MMO gonna Korean MMO.

I dunno; GGG have been balancing around people with 5k hours in the game and I don't see them stopping anytime soon. Especially when there are people with far fewer than 5k hours saying 'Ruthless is the easiest game mode', which is actually the sort of thing I'd expect someone with 5k hours in the game to say.

And then the same person goes and says some version of 'but don't judge progression based on what my pace and effort'...so which is it, dudeperson? Is it 'the easiest game mode', or is it just you who feels that way because you put in '10 hours a fucking day' and it's still quite challenging for others?

Or do you just want the endgame to be much, much harder for Ye Elite Few? If so, that'd just make it even worse for everyone else, don't you think?

I don't even have to kick the ball here. Did you forget which goal was yours?

Did you forget which sport your own thread was about?

OTOH I guess there's no real 'goal' in a gym other than improving one's self for one's own sake. If the gym isn't providing that, that's on the person using it to figure out how to use the equipment more appropriately, not the gym to go retuning all the machines so that your average plebs just trying to moderately better themselves are suddenly being treated like gym junkies too. Good way to get people to quit your gym.

edit: and do not underestimate the implications of those quotes I made from the official GGG announcement. They honestly didn't expect anyone to be in red maps -- and I don't think it was because of poor availability. BUT if so, then by all means, seems an easy fix...but then again, so does a lot 'wrong' with this game.

Anyway, *baffling* as hell thread OP that could do with some clean-up to bring the title (ie the clickbait) more in line with the actual argument. Then again, maybe it wouldn't be as clickbaity as calling GGG's patented 'Fucking Hard As Fuck mode 'easier than standard...oh, the joys of sensationalised titles representing more pedestrian bodies of work.

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If all I wanted to do was grind mindlessly forever one shotting mobs that pose no threat to me at all I'd go back to black desert online.

No, I think if that's all you wanted to do, you'd play a game where you know how to do that. A game you've played for 5k hours and play 10 hours a day.

We both know there are far more challenging games out there and, despite GGG's spin of Ruthless, virtually nothing they can do to this game will make it any harder for you. It'll just make it more tedious with its arbitrary gating of content. A tedium you will probably misread as challenge and then complain it's boring/unnecessarily limited as though that wasn't the entire point to begin with. That is, after all, all this thread is about.

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Peterlerock wrote:

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Char1983 wrote:

Funny how those old discussions are coming back.

Are you at least able to access Atziri / Uber Atziri in Ruthless? If my memory serves me right (which I am not at all sure it is), that content was some of the more deterministically accessible hard content back in the day.

You only get Atziri fragments in Alva temple, in the non-special rooms, that are upgraded enough to have reward chests (they replace the temple mod items you usually get there).

So you can get to Atziri kind of "deterministically", but even with Alva passives, you need a lot of maps to see a temple, then need the right rooms, then probably need Harvest to get 4 different ones...
Alva shows up in like 1% of maps, and you get missions in like 7% of maps when you spec into her. So it's really grindy.

I think Manni2 was the first to enter Atziri's domain in SSF Ruthless, and that was yesterday, 8(?) days into the league.

Yesterday i saw Manni entered to shaper realm as first and then he killed shaper as 1st. It was fast, shortly after he just killed maven as first. It was amazing to read this. I hope we talk about the same person, but nick sounds familiar.

I love ruthless, great mode. I cant agree its easier then sc. But its fun and great experience.

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BossOfThisGym wrote:

"

The_Impeacher wrote:

Softcore is always going to be easy.

your sig and private profile :^)


I'd say playing regular SSF is harder than running easy maps forever in HC to be #6309 on the ladder.

#6309 on the HC R ladder is lvl 4 so not likely. But you can just farm 'The Coast' instead if you want to do better.

its really funny to hear that people have already beaten endgame bosses in ruthless after 1 week of playtime. Because that is exactly what a loud % of players predicted would happen well in advance of the mode getting released.

GGG releases all these hyped up messages saying how difficult and long the road is...but then in true GGG fashion they are proven to be completely inadequate and incorrect about their own game. Pretty much sums up every single change made in the last few years.