Objectively the worst league?
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By going up to red maps I already went way beyond what many people do, particularly some of the people the OP is referring to.
However as mentioned previously I used 4 links on 2 "Dead" or "Unplayable" builds but got to Reds with Many avenues for improvement. The "wall" some make out to be so high is nothing but a stepping stone. If I am doing Red map content and beyond I dont think I should be doing it on a 4 link and no defences/damage almost literally lol. |
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" You have a point there, mate. Until now, there has been no true competition to PoE. Let's see how June unfolds and what it puts on the table... A sword he brought, his foes to maim and rend,
from places dark behind forbidden doors, But night by night he woke with frighten'd roars from darkest dreams, too strange to comprehend. (Anonymous) |
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" Of course melee works, melee has also always worked for all content. It just feels much worse and requires much more effort and investment. This is obvious by the stats of the most played builds. If melee was so good at sanctum why do you get less of a penalty for getting hit than ranged? Because ranged is much easier and has to deal with less potential hits. Lets just decrease the penalty for getting hit while in melee as a bandaid for content clearly designed to favour movement and being able to attack at medium range. Just because something is viable does not mean it doesn't need to be adjusted or looked at, this is completely obvious when you look at build viability and diversity. Last edited by dupie#7991 on Jan 5, 2023, 7:50:44 PM
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" As much as I like old Diablo i don't think it's looking that promising. Gameplay from 4 days ago https://youtu.be/sVi7HtvOinE Looks dated and boring at least for me. Also cartoonish. Just by watching i'm not getting the good vibes. And what's with those titles on effect, absorption, absorption, ABSORPTION! holy fuck... Worst thing is that i don't like where PoE is going either. I played this league only because i wanted to make the build. Sanctum is, one of the top 3 worst league mechanics i've played along with Kalandra and pre rework Harvest for the reasons mentioned before many times. Char progression is terrible. Loot feels devalued, repetitive, predictable and uninteresting, divines inflated. Getting same uniques over and over again from same league mechanic is ughhh. Big ticket items gated behind Feared and Ubers with abysmal drop rate. Fun factor is getting lower and lower and frustration and grind is going up and up. Last edited by TorsteinTheFallen#1295 on Jan 6, 2023, 9:44:30 AM
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DIViations
As fellow Aussie and all-round top-tier game assessor SkillUp put it when talking about both Diablo Immortal AND Diablo IV: This is going to be great IF Blizzard don't fuck up the monetisation. So when he had to eat some humble pie regarding the former, he also tempered his entire take on the latter (which was otherwise glowing with praise) with the proviso that yes, Blizzard shat the bed with DI and could definitely do it again with DIV, which would nullify a lot of if not all of the praiseworthy DIV content shown so far. I'd argue they're different cases: DI is a NetEase collaboration aimed at China's ferociously addictive gambling scene, its disgustingly hedonistic nouvea-riche mobile game market (amusing that it almost didn't get released there), whereas DIV is distancing itself from that debacle as much as possible. It's priced as triple A, which means it should almost certainly make enough aftermarket cash with direct cosmetics/cosmetic battle passes alone.
But...but...but...Blizzard did go full p2w with DI, so we honestly don't know. I've just learned not to commit either way. See how it lands, then react. This thread abuses the term 'objectively', so here's usage of it that defies criticism: Diablo IV is objectively a game some people will like. Path of Exile is objectively a game other people like. Objectively, there will be some overlap between the two. Objectively, we cannot know how it's all going to turn out. Subjectively, I think it's Blizzard's race to lose. GGG have been haemorrhaging good will for a while now, and even at their peak they were fairly niche in the overall gaming market. I could test the waters to see if non-Exiles I game with knew of PoE and usually it was some variant of 'oh, that free to play overly complicated Diablo clone?' Believe it or not, there are still gamers who equate free to play with second-class rather than 'generous'. Usually older gamers who remember old sayings like 'there's no such thing as a free lunch'. On top of that, Blizzard are desperate for this win, after years of being treated like an (out of season April Fool's) joke. Normally I'd reject tinfoil hat theories regarding release date coincidences but I am willing to entertain the notion that DIV's release date is conveniently a month ahead of Exilecon and the scheduled 'unveiling' of Path of Exile '2'. Again -- this is the 'subjective' part of the show, so I'm allowed that. :) Objectively again, there is still room in the world for both games. They operate with very different financial models, appeal to very different sorts of gamers with very different sorts of goals. PoE remains the model of inch-wide, mile-deep ARPG design, while DIV is leaning heavily into the immersive world hybrid of MMO scale, ARPG gameplay. There's no real reason to consider the two competitors...until we consider that maybe there are gamers out there who can enjoy both types of ARPG, and who have no brand loyalty or serious preference. I think they'll be the battleground, and I use 'they' because there's no way anyone reading this is part of that uncommitted majority. On topic, I think Bestiary was objectively the worst league. It launched in a state that needed to be fixed almost immediately, introducing a new mechanic that no one seemed to like in terms of controls. By the time it went core, GGG had to overhaul it entirely. They also put a lot of work into the menagerie and its master, Einhar, who proved a fan favourite in terms of writing and voice acting (deservedly so). Hell, I was told directly by a dev that I would probably really like it, so they really had a lot of confidence in it being a winner even with picky fucks like me. Boy were they ever wrong. Yeah, so I made a zoo for my many PoE pets...I would never keep them in cages or kill them for rewards. That's not a bestiary -- that's slaughter. I've dislike plenty of leagues for various reasons, but Bestiary is the only one I actively hated so much as a concept I refused to play it. I just watched the dumpster fire as people grappled with the 'do you not have nets?' debacle. And even when it did go core, I felt that red beasts skewed the shit out of any given area's difficulty, and they were only semi-voluntary. You could run or avoid the beasts, but it wasn't like, say, Betrayal, Legion, Ambush, or Incursion where you had to actively trigger the encounter. When Bestiary went core, it imposed on the player rather than offering more to do. I have never, ever liked league gimmicks that do that. Not even Anarchy, which I thought was a clever addition but still spiked the shit out of the core game's difficulty -- oh look, something off-screen is using flameblaaahhhhhfuckyouMagnus! So Bestiary really had shit stacked against it. It had a clunky mechanic on launch; it was thematically immoral and distasteful; it wasn't a triggerable league gimmick; and it followed three far superior leagues: Legacy (best...league...ever), Harbinger (incredibly cool concept and well implemented, albeit also not triggerable) and Abyss, a twist on the fan favourite 'side area' type of gimmick. After those, Bestiary just seemed to try too hard in all the wrong ways. Fine, so maybe we're still in subjective territory. Or maybe my subjective feelings were validated by objective factors...meh, probably not. Alright, Bestiary league apologists, there's your cue. If I like a game, it'll either be amazing later or awful forever. There's no in-between. I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. Last edited by Foreverhappychan#4626 on Jan 5, 2023, 8:32:44 PM
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I'm loving this league.
One of the best, and the first out of map mechanics that is actually good. |
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" Both the above posts are part of why I shared my league experience earlier here. The thing is neither of you are wrong, it just gets very weird when reading General Discussion as people of varying degrees of playstyles etc start interacting without specifics. My previous post was not some humble brag but an admittance of how "bad" you can play this game and still get way beyond most. No God gamer or anything of the sort. A far cry from dead build/unplayable/need 200 Div/0 loot/0 currency/need 50 Mil dps and all auras for Acts or maps etc etc. I wrote how lazy I play this league and immediately after I get someone telling me how Real Sanctum boss is burst or auto loose. I wouldnt disagree with him as I havnt reached that point as well as kill before killed has always been in POE and other games. However I wouldnt say what he said to someone who wrote what I did but rather explain how to prepare for such encounters but this is not what GD is and I doubt Feedback section is any different lol. |
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" Maybe. What I'm seeing, instead, is numbers and messages informing me of WTF is happening during combat. You'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of players who don't agree PoE needs more clarity with that aspect. Heck, we just learned during the curses "readjustements" that some of the curses were bugged, and we never figured it out because we simply didn't have the means to do so. |
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" I understand but that is strange concept to me. I played D1 in '98. For that time game had such immersion and ambiance like no other that as a kid had to mute sound sometime because it was too scary. Just fkn dark arpg, it was masterpiece. Diablo 2, no flashy titles either. Then D3 came with that vibe of ka-ching flashy numbers and effect titles. Just horrible style of game design for what it should be originally. I know PoE lacks transparency but it's just part of it's soul. It's one of it's quirks of digging and figuring out stuff over time. For example I just found out after 4 years of intensive playing that out of 4 Shaper Guardians only Hydra has 200% damage multiplier on 2 types of attacks. It's one of the many things that makes this game different than everything else and I like it for what it is. Last edited by TorsteinTheFallen#1295 on Jan 6, 2023, 9:42:33 AM
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" That is I think PoE's biggest flaw atm. beside the lackluster league mechanics: players don't get proper feedback while playing. You randomly die and have no idea what's going on, or how to prevent that in the future. You don't know what your spells, skills, or minions are doing and how they are performing. Initially I guess this was so players couldn't deduct what the "best" build is, but since we have PoB now, it basically means that the group of players is divided into those that can do very high level analysis of builds and create builds far beyond anything a normal player could, and those that are faced with a game optimized for those people, who have no chance to make their own build and are forced to copy a build from one of those top players. |
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