PoE 3.20 Feedback

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Kelvynn wrote:

I'm a long time PoE player with a habit of beating all endgame content and completing 40 challenges on my own merit in every league. Here's my feedback after finishing the Sanctum league. Not claiming to speak for anybody but myself.

Warning: Long text with a TL;DR at the end.

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PoE 3.19 was the worst state I've ever seen this game in. I made a long critical feedback post after finishing it. Did anything change in 3.20? Some things definitely got better, some stayed the same, and I don't think anything got worse. That's a positive dynamic. It would take some effort to make the game worse than it was in 3.19 anyway. Let's go over the major points.


The Forbidden Sanctum

For the first time since 3.15 we got a league that didn't feel cheap. All recent leagues except 3.17 (where we got the Atlas tree) were hastily put together with simplistic mechanics and some powerful crafting thrown on top to please the crowd. But they had no depth and only a temporary illusion of power that was never intended to be added to the core game.

The Sanctum is different. You can see the effort put into it. Original mechanics, specially designed areas, a new boss with non-trivial lore. Definitely add Sanctum to the core game! Make some Atlas passives for it too.

If you feel that there is not enough design space - make space by removing Metamorph: it's a crappy league mechanic that's neither fun nor rewarding. The only valuable part of it are the catalysts. Move them to the general loot pool, or some other league (e.g. Harbinger).

One room at a time is not going to be good for a mechanic with a standard 10% chance of occurring that takes 32 rooms to complete. Give us a floor at a time. Currency rewards should be increased too.

More notes on the Sanctum:
- it's totally unfair to melee characters, and taking less damage at close range does not compensate for it, especially when fighting multiple enemies;
- offers can be hard to click on, you have to approach the skull from a certain angle;
- the wormhole sucking you in for just being near it is super annoying! make it require clicking. I'll decide when I want to enter;
- after a room is stored, remove the wormhole;


Archnemesis is Gone

Thank gods! That abomination pretty much ruined the year in PoE. But at least you had the balls to admit that it was bad and get rid of it. I hope somebody made some notes. Next time you want to make a global change like that, remember to think how it's going to work with the existing mechanics such as Delve, Blight, Heist, etc.


Hiding Nerfs Behind Improvements

When I saw the announcement for the league where the Harvest got changed, it sounded awesome. Some good mechanical changes, tradable currency, no more going to the 3rd party side to buy the crafts. Oh, and some redundant crafts got removed - but don't worry, they can be found elsewhere. I was so happy that I bought a supporter pack.

And then the actual patch happened. Virtually all good crafts were GONE. Without any warning. No Manifesto post explaining the nerf. No mention in the patch notes. I felt SCAMMED. To add insult to injury, some anonymous dev behind this nerf posted the infamous "Now that crafts are tradeable..." pretending that they didn't know that the crafts have always been tradeable. Why you little piece of...

One league later, they are changing the unique jewels and vaal mods. And we get the same treatment again. The announcement mentions only the positive changes. But not a word about the nerfs:
- these jewels can no longer have any implicits;
- stun avoidance vaal mod is simply gone, without any explanation.

This seems to be a new marketing tactic by GGG. Hide nerfs behind good changes. Advertise the good changes heavily. Don't mention the nerfs at all. Make the players happy. Encourage them to buy supporter packs. By the time they discover the nerfs, GGG already has their money. They can rant or ragequit all they want.

I find this practice unethical and I'm going to protest with my wallet. Not giving GGG any more money until this practice stops and amends are made (the nerfs are reversed or compensated for by other changes). The more players choose to protest that way, the sooner GGG may reconsider how they communicate with the players about the nerfs. Somebody might even tell that one guy that Harvest crafts have always been tradeable.


Divine, Exalted, shards, cards

One of the weirdest changes in 2022 was the Divine/Exalted swap. The explanations for it were weak and made little sense. Values that defined PoE economy for 10 years were changed overnight seemingly for no reason. It felt just silly. But OK, what's done is done. Now, how long is it going to take to clean up the mess craeted by that weird decision?

No Divine shards? "They are called chaos orbs" (c) Chris. You don't want to make more shards, we can understand that. But you introduced yet another shard (Fracturing) on the same day! Which is priced in chaos orbs just the same. You contradict yourself. More shards, or no more shards? Make up your mind already.

Nobody had time to fix the currency tab yet? Exalted orb is still sitting there right next to Mirror as the second most valuable currency. With its shards too.

Exalted shard is worth less than a chaos orb. And yet an influenced version of the chaos recipe awards them. Making the high level recipe worth less than its low level version. At this point you should be awarding full Exalted orbs for it. Which would make sense in that recipe's progression.

Exalted shard has no reason to exist anymore. Just get rid of it.

There are many divination cards that award Exalts that used to be valuable. They are all worthless now. 1/12 of an Exalt is not even worth picking up. Convert at least some of them to Divines. Or bump their rewards by a lot.


Other notes

- Corruption-only jewels should have a random vaal implicit. That would partially undo the nerf in 3.20.

- Sanctum is yet another mechanic that cannot be interrupted to trade. We have way too many of those now. Trade improvements that would allow the players to sell items without exiting the map are way overdue.

- Rename the Fractured fossil to Splitting. It produces Split items. There is now a Fracturing orb too.

- Blight towers stop attacking when you are not near them. But the monsters keep moving regardless of where you are. This has been waiting for a fix for years. Fix it already.

- Add a way to make Delve monsters spawn faster, similar to Breach. Replace Guarded Hoards with a node for faster spawning.

- Check the amount of xp awarded in the Domain of Endless Conflict. You can level from 70 to 100 in about 20 runs of that thing, while standing AFK in the middle and fully leveling about 100 gems. Is that really intended?

- Sirus is still terrible, after all the fixes. And his Uber version only makes it worse. He constantly teleports into the black clouds. The 'projection' thing blocks the top part of the arena, you can't see Sirus behind it. The uber version can double teleport making it impossible to track. If you die and come back, the clouds can be blocking all paths to Sirus. And he can just shoot his DIE laser in your face the moment you re-enter without any warning. The overall visual design is horrible: everything is dark, black on black, can't see shit. This boss needs a lot of bugfixes and a visual rework.


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TL;DR

The game is better in 3.20 than it was in 3.19 which was the rock bottom. Sanctum is good. Hiding nerfs behind improvements is bad.