Game feels dull and boring, here's a list of reasons why I quit sanctum today

#1 - Not rewarding

Doing 32 maps of league content for a shitty sanctified relic and 1 divine is not worth it

If 1 divine is 240c that makes a 1 divine run a return of - 7c per map

Add like 10-20c per 32 maps in various loot and the average return comes out to

a whopping 8.1c per map weeeee.....

I didn't always get a divine on the sanctum runs I completed

I rarely got some runs with 2 divines, which made up for the empty runs

I never got more than 2 divines in a single run

The loot is also not guaranteed because you can fail on the 4th floor and lose the loot

So it's possible to do 30 maps of content and die and lose it all

Im certain this league was less rewarding than Ultimatum or Harvest or Deli or Ritual....

The floors generally had piss poor loot till floor 4

Only currency and lack of any jackpots (besides a mirror) made it feel very meh

Sanctified relics were generally too garbage to ever have any value, but some people got lucky and got usable ones

The best 2 I found this league was 1 mod movement speed, and 1 mod chaos dot multi

Not that insane or rewarding


#2 - No content

Uber bosses are just DPS checks and generally unrewarding

People have done 30-40 runs with a total return of under 1 divine

That's 3000-4000+ chaos /240 = 12 divines spent to 1 divine return

So it generally doesn't feel worth making a bosser or even farming these bosses

The only content left in POE is build creation and you guys are gutting that league after league

This league you nerfed a bunch of stuff, no skill buffs and removed tons of unique jewels

Idk why it feels like GGG is trimming the # of viable builds each league

So the only thing to do in POE rn is grind for currency to make some meta cheese build...

Kinda... boring


#3 - The non meta builds I tried to make were weak and unfun

I tried a number of various off-meta builds and they sucked

They could map but the level of investment vs their output was pathetic

This comes back to GGG never buffing anything

So many builds and uniques have fell behind and are dog shit imo

Not even worth the time to play and you're left feeling like you wasted your time


#4 - The league content was pathetically tiny

If you take a second to think about what sanctum actually brought to the table

It was basically only 3 rooms on repeat

Defeat guards, run to exit, fight a boss

That's it

It was horribly repetitive once you've done 5-8 sanctum clears

The only purpose of doing it was the hope of getting a usable relic and a divine maybe if you got one

The actual content this league brought was next to none

Absolutely do not care about the profit per hour.

I'm more frustrated by the fact that I can't run Sanctum on most builds because they aren't mobile enough, they aren't bursty enough, they aren't imbalanced enough.
I didn’t understand around whom this content was balanced, with non-stop enemies flickering at you, shooting off-screen with too fast projectiles, and all this while chasing with a beam.
Terrible bosses in terms of mode design, where the player should not take hits, but the arena is 99% unsafe. And a fight longer than 0.1 sec results in damage.
delays before dealing damage are scanty, I don’t see how a character with 0-50ms should avoid them without movement skills.
Well, for sweets, unique relics that REWARD the game's cancer - glass cannons. Didn't take damage due to "oneshot everything offscreen"? Keep a ring for the mirror, which can breathe new life into build building, but it's too rare to be used anywhere other than a couple of meta builds without creating new ones.

There is of course an interesting argument about "the right build" as there were better builds for farming Legion and Blight.
But c'mon. Not being able to complete the content you set up 32 maps just because unlike glass cannons, your build doesn't kill the boss instantly. Oh wow.

Come over to Sanctum Ruthless :P Plenty of people doing sanctum content there and completing runs. Weird how that works out with no divines in sight, no movement skills, no onslaught. Things don't have to spew out tons of currency to be challenging or fun you know. The only part I agree with is that there could be way more room type variety. Other than that the league itself feels nice enough for a temp league.

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arknath wrote:

Come over to Sanctum Ruthless :P Plenty of people doing sanctum content there and completing runs. Weird how that works out with no divines in sight, no movement skills, no onslaught. Things don't have to spew out tons of currency to be challenging or fun you know. The only part I agree with is that there could be way more room type variety. Other than that the league itself feels nice enough for a temp league.

Ruthless has a very small selection of builds. It's undeniable that cold dot and seismic don't feel any problem even in Ruthless. But it is absurd to think that battle arenas, with Guards that are fatter than map bosses, are simply impassable for No Hit unless you have infinite dps. And even more so without a move skill. And even more so under 32859762 afflictions that reduce your speed, damage. And increasing the speed and damage of mobs and traps.

It's not a problem as long as you don't encounter situations where you can't help but take damage.
There is a very good example in the face of the game Hades. Mobs have a delay before causing damage, there is a visual trigger, like intuition, which makes it clear what will happen now. And no matter what, there are always safe zones, dash is always available, you always know that the archer will not spin at the speed of a cyclone, but will shoot with a delay, which will make it possible to avoid damage. There are no ten narrow passages in which it is impossible not to take damage from an off-screen projectile.

It was only necessary to repeat the debugged and working system, adding their own ideas. A bicycle with square wheels, although suitable for climbing stairs, is otherwise not the norm.

Rewards don't bother me much as investment and that's been escalating for a while.

Back in the day you could rotate Shaper / Elder within 6-8 maps.
Conquerors then took way more even when reduced twice.
Eldritch take 32 flat which is even more.

Much like this and Lake league. Spam maps. Instead of dropping a brick on zoomer DPS they cater to it and balance around it. MPH "Maps Per Hour" It sucks and it's boring.

^yes, this. Huge problem with the current state of PoE and a very very dangerous sign moving forward. The amount of time it takes just to set up a single run of something is crazy. And I personally think its because there are too many people making a "living" on PoE. It is pretty clear through interviews and talks and interactions that GGG pays an exorbitant amount of attention to streamers who play 10+ hours a day. When your developers' attention is almost exclusively directed at THAT, then those people are who the game is inevitably designed for. Screw the rest of the players that can't spend more than 1-2 hours a day (if I'm lucky....) playing a GAME.

It is NOT life. It isn't even a competitive game. It is a casual, mostly single player game yet it is more and more designed to test your time commitment over your actual "enjoyment".

And this isn't even JUST seen in maps and league content. It's seen in crafting changes, in drop changes, in unique changes, all over the place. More time, more time, more time, more time rather than actual creative and meaningful game play changes. It's basically going the way of ALL freemium games...which is super disappointing and disheartening

that feeling when you do 16 invitations(all i got from start of league) and get this beaty:

priceless.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

^yes, this. Huge problem with the current state of PoE and a very very dangerous sign moving forward. The amount of time it takes just to set up a single run of something is crazy.

One of my primary issues with the MPH design is it removed atmosphere, notable encounters happening while just playing and any sort of terrain interactions like using a wall for cover.

There are so many powerful designs in an ARPG that simply can't work in PoE anymore. Overwhelmed by enemies. Using terrain, strafe projectiles. There's no intricacy to combat. I "think" they were trying for something like that with AN but forgot to reduce the density of rares.

Slap white mobs then get into notable encounters with rares. That's a compromise. I'd prefer every enemy matters but it's a step away from just moving fast avoids 90% of your problems.

What's the point of MTX, visuals and graphic improvements if players are punished to stop and look at it for a moment. It just feels wrong. Difference between trying to entertain your audience or just trying to keep them mindlessly busy. Even more ironic given the theme of this league.

You're in Sanctum and it's like... Hey, they get it. Then you're like 30 maps?
Two totally conflicting concepts in the same league design.

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Xzorn wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

^yes, this. Huge problem with the current state of PoE and a very very dangerous sign moving forward. The amount of time it takes just to set up a single run of something is crazy.

You're in Sanctum and it's like... Hey, they get it. Then you're like 30 maps?
Two totally conflicting concepts in the same league design.

Is it tho?

I get where you are coming from, assuming your intention is to actually clear a map and interact with mechanics.
If you do that and it takes you some 10 mins per map to do just that, then you´ll spend at least 300 mins or 5hrs to setup a single sanctum run.
And thats not even accounting for rolling maps and stuff like that.


However, there will always be a bunch of players min/maxing the living shit out of this. As in buying maps with simple layouts in bulk, checking the spawnpoints for sanctums as fast as possible and then leaving the map.
If that was taking them 60 seconds per map, then they are able to setup a full sanctum run in about 30 mins, resulting in them running 10 times as many sanctums as you´d be able to, if you cleared the map.

The numbers are made up but still, GGG has to take this into account. If players were able to average ~2 divines per sanctum run in raw currency, then this results in about 4 divs per hour.
Nothing to write home about but still profitable enough to motivate a portion of playerbase to do just that and also farm valuable sanctum only drops.


You may not play like this and you may not like it, doesnt change the fact that players will absolutely do it as long as its profitable enough.

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Orbaal wrote:

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Xzorn wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

^yes, this. Huge problem with the current state of PoE and a very very dangerous sign moving forward. The amount of time it takes just to set up a single run of something is crazy.

You're in Sanctum and it's like... Hey, they get it. Then you're like 30 maps?
Two totally conflicting concepts in the same league design.

Is it tho?

I get where you are coming from, assuming your intention is to actually clear a map and interact with mechanics.
If you do that and it takes you some 10 mins per map to do just that, then you´ll spend at least 300 mins or 5hrs to setup a single sanctum run.
And thats not even accounting for rolling maps and stuff like that.


However, there will always be a bunch of players min/maxing the living shit out of this. As in buying maps with simple layouts in bulk, checking the spawnpoints for sanctums as fast as possible and then leaving the map.
If that was taking them 60 seconds per map, then they are able to setup a full sanctum run in about 30 mins, resulting in them running 10 times as many sanctums as you´d be able to, if you cleared the map.

The numbers are made up but still, GGG has to take this into account. If players were able to average ~2 divines per sanctum run in raw currency, then this results in about 4 divs per hour.
Nothing to write home about but still profitable enough to motivate a portion of playerbase to do just that and also farm valuable sanctum only drops.


You may not play like this and you may not like it, doesnt change the fact that players will absolutely do it as long as its profitable enough.

I have to ask though. Would this be as much problem if movement speed and mobility were more normalized? This is just one branch in a tree of issues however if players can only move a certain rate then enemies can be based on that rate as well. Enemies won't need random +400% speed.

The difference between those who spam and those who simply play is a smaller spectrum and at the same time effort is rewarded equally so that is also a smaller spectrum. The game shifts more towards "What should I do with my time" rather than "This is the optimal use of my time".

It's not strictly about making players into turtles. It's about how large the spectrum is and the negative results it can have on gameplay like the ones I mentioned.

I come from a long history of MMOs back to MUDs. Time sink isn't the issue for me. The issue is genuine entertainment by engaging players Vs trivial time sink. In Sanctum you have both. The Sanctum itself engages players. Getting there is the trivial time sink.

GGG seems to understand how to create engaging content but also seems uninterested or unwilling to deal with problems that prevent such content from working properly. Speed is just one example.