Initial Ruthless Feedback - Early Mapping

So I played in the ruthless beta, but lacked the time to get into maps during that. And that lack of time still gnaws at me, so I only recently got to the point where mapping is an options, but I still wanted to get a first impressions feedback for it.

First, I still enjoy ruthless in the overall, and prefer it to standard, and am eager for Ruthless Standard, where I can keep a roster ongoing, then enjoy dives into normal league.

For added context, while I play in Trade Ruthless, my style is more or less Solo Self Found. I sell random items for fairly low values (1C or less type stuff), and don't buy items (mostly because it's a pain to hunt down, don't like using external sites, and the mild joy of self discovery).

A big issue for me was the double gut punch of Act 10 Kitava follow up by immediatly having to do the fight again, but much harder due to the added random rare mob spawns (Plus the worse resists). While I did manage (mostly by a zerging tactic), it wasn't particularly fun to fight one of the harder and longer bosses twice in a row.

The progression has felt pretty good, it's slow of course, but I still feel like it is mostly forward moving and in one good night of playing (a rare day off) got me through T1 fully completed with bonus, about half of my T2's and a few T3's, at least permitting some choices in Atlas Points. At no point have I felt as though I have no maps, or might run out, though I'm not exactly drowning in them, and have to make a hard call here and there with modifiers I know will be hard for me (like Cold as Bonus Damage, given my sorry state of -30 Cold Res at the moment), or bosses I know will be hard, which while farming are at least a skippable option.

Maps feel active enough without being drowning in events, I have averaged about 1.5 'events' per maps, with a fair spread (nothing banned or encouraged up to that point). And they feel about correctly rewarding for the game mode, I get an oil or two from Cassia, a handful of artifacts from Expiditions, etc.

Of the ones I've done (all of them excluding Ritual and Metamorph), the only one that feels off is Tujin, which I get, Ruthless didn't want 'free' items or automatic items, but the insanity of his costs may have well seen him escorted out of Ruthless. Rog who also lets you get 'free' items, and even modify them in a way similar to crafting isn't that rarified in terms of resource costs. You could have reduced Tujin's prices by 75% and they'd still be limiting.

Otherwise the only real feed back is the daily master missions and crafting;

For dailies, I'd think 1 Daily randomly allocated to one Master (perhaps obeying your Altas Modifiers) feels like I'd be a good change. It's juuuust enough you get something for showing up, and keeps the masters feeling like they're real entities calling on you for help, while offering a bare thread of forward progression, though you'd still supplying your own maps. Figuring out how to allocate teirs could just be random (Up to your futhrest progression), rather than always highest. A thought, I'm not strongly against 'bonus from map completes only' as it is.

For crafting, I do think ruthless would be improved with it, even if the costs where tweaked and some of the higher end stuff (like meta crafts) where kept out. But as it stands you can get badly progression locked due to your inability to fix basic problems (no MS boots, a key resist gap, etc), and there's just nothing you can really do other than hope the problem solves itself. This doubles down on PoEs core problem that 'kill more' becomes the only viable solution, encouraging more and more the player to abandon defenses and just focus on killing things off screen and shrinking the viable builds around that. And given how rare Alter orbs are (I've found more Chaos than Alters), you can't even really just use those to fix a magic item. Having resist crafts (or other 'basic) crafts cost say, 10-20 Trans orbs puts a lot of value in those, gives basic, simple to follow farming goals that let the player get over the hills, so they can actually try and climb the mountain.

The main issue I found with mapping, and the reason I stopped Ruthless on my main account, was the lack of maps from yellow onwards. With so few alchemy orbs - even IDing and vendoring blues for occasional shards - I get barely enough to alch each yellow map once for the bonus, and because of this I'm having to run "trans and go".
This makes for low quantity even with the map drop bonus, and so it's really hard to sustain still less progress: and with about 3 vaal orbs altogether there's no prospect of continuing in red maps even if I could get that far. And it's not like I can grind more maps when the maps don't drop.
Back in the day the free Zana missions really helped both in opening new maps and in helping sustain; so even re-enabling the Kirac passive for a guaranteed free mission per day might make the difference.

On basic crafting... adding a low or even mid-tier resist recipe would be nice. Maybe add Harvest crafts which would allow these, they wouldn't be guaranteed and would have to be ground out but at least they would be achievable.

I made a thread about this a while back, but the biggest problem is that maps are way to easy when you are forced to 'trans and go' and the mapping just started to feel very slow and boring. I like the concept of ruthless, but I feel it is totally undercooked currently and needs quite a lot of work to be something engaging.

While I've seen some good proposals for possibly tweaking Ruthless slightly through the storyline, the biggest problem in Ruthless is getting good gameplay in the endgame. Yellow and red maps, as mentioned, are needed for fun endgame play.

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Turtledove wrote:

While I've seen some good proposals for possibly tweaking Ruthless slightly through the storyline, the biggest problem in Ruthless is getting good gameplay in the endgame. Yellow and red maps, as mentioned, are needed for fun endgame play.

Obviously I withheld any commentary about yellow+ content, I'm not personally there yet, thus cannot give any useful opinions about them. Thus far, in white, it feels fine to good (slow but forward), which is what I think Ruthless wants to be in that window, and what I'd like Ruthless to be in the general regard.