Ruthless mode

Would GGG consider some idea? I like ruthless mode but it lacks league mechanics (extra content). Not that I don't want a better gear (I want lol), I just want it to be present in game even without much reward. It's almost missing. Very often there is nothing on the map (shrine is a joke). By the way all league mechanics that I've encountered gave me some blue parts may be 1 gold. Bad chance spawning mechanic plus bad chance dropping gear. I don't know what to say. I've still got pretty geared by farming mobs so why get rid of fun stuff? Hmm? May be I'm mistaken. I don't know. It's just the feeling.

Johnathan touched on Ruthless in his Kripparian interview. Good watch and they cover some of the things you mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79kgVK3XGuk&pp=ygUba3JpcHBhcmlhbiBqb2huYXRoYW4gcm9nZXJz

So GGG has a long history of writing off anything that didn't gain quick easy traction and continued popularity. Racing seasons, PvP, Racing events, Battle Royal, Standard league is an afterthought that they literally never make any designs for or attempt to improve. You can see where this is going.

I saw this coming in Ruthless Alpha, some of the changes were just so overboard and uncalled for. And many of the changes were good "at first sight" (such as removing Div cards) but had negative "knock on effects" that actually just make the gameplay loop feel too samey and tedious. Div cards for example actually are one of the few reasons to run a specific map. removing them deleted a good part of many maps "identity".

I was 100% on board with removing div cards until mid way through second or third Ruthless league. I changed my mind 99% due to the above. But also 1% of me likes the idea of farming a specific item over many weeks and I've decided that its better to have that slow progress in a mode that is SO INSANELY AUSTERE and without self determination or agency. I think it needs Div cards as a counter.

Anyway Ruthless really failed to hit the mark, players who are most suited to such a challenge mode have all nopped out after VERY brief attempts. Alk and Quin69, Steelmage and Ziz, Ben, Nugi are all players who were at least theoretically well suited or "inclined" for such a mode and they might have a grand total of 3 weeks of logging into the mode between them.

Alk and QUin notably gave it a real shot, and it very quickly got stupidly tedious, and unfun for both of them. You could tell it was orders of magnitude too "attenuated" or over cooked.

One of the biggest mistakes was stripping out all the cool Altas tree stuff instead of making it just rarer. Reducing excitement and possibility, severely limiting creativity and taking a sterilization flame thrower to almost all the more interesting improvements POE has had since 2.x.

Another one is movement skills. Yes current movement skill completely obviate "positioning" in the game. But deleting them was too strong a solution. Giving all of them 2 uses and a 30s cooldown would have been fine. With melee gap closers like shield charge and leap slam given half that with 3 uses.

Melee in the mode is just the dumbest thing you can possibly do. All their design mistakes in the core game are quadrupled or tripled in Ruthless. The negative attack speed multiplier makes most of the skills feel like absolute punitive trash and with no reasonable upgrade progression they stay that way. the limp scaling that needs overly specific gear in easier modes is compounded in ruthless, the lack of stronger use cases is compounded in Ruthless, you NEVER want to risk losing portals and resources because you're playing a hipster build.

"I can't run this league mechanic that I only rarely see because of my build" is massively compounded. The feeling if "risk aversion" is so excruciating in Ruthless for me personally that I can no longer enjoy it in a league, and will probably only play it in standard in the future.

I realize that wanting 1.x to 1.9 flavor POE is MANY (Krip) and possibly multiple 10's of other Ruthless fans desire. But IMO the mode really should have tried to be a better more thoughtfully crafted less loot dumpster version of 3.2x POE. Less of the current clear speed meta space ship shooter version of POE.

The gameplay loop and feel of items mattering and not being constantly pulled in too many directions at once is fucking superb though. Its really quite a D2 like experience if D2 was tuned harder to progress in and had trash tier time to live design that's POE's most embarrassing shortcoming. And it is at least fun for multiple playthroughs if you like improvising and adapting (being a gamer) based on what you drop.

After a while however you hit days even weeks and hundreds of thousands of kills between anything interesting or fun or different happening. Map sustain is the worst resource minigame GGG ever tried to make into a thing, and they are WAY TO FUCKING AFRAID to give you "yolo currency" like exalts and regals. These oprbs already have next to no chance to be a good/relevant result, there's no need for them to even be rare. Let alone Hens teeth rarity.

Ruthless doesn't lack league mechanics, you just have to earn your ability to sustain them just as you have to earn everything more slowly. A lot of people who complain don't even know how blocking works in ruthless or that master spawns share the same pool as the blockable mechanics. I only play a few hours a day at most and took a week off recently and right now I am happily sustaining t14+ maps and doing rituals in about 80% of them, and various master mission of top of that.

There is no way to up the spawn rate of league mechanics in ruthless in lower tier maps without breaking the mode; the Affliction mechanic has already broken it in a bunch of ways and giving players blight and legion encounters in abundance would remove the whole 'loot scarcity' dynamic of ruthless entirely. If you tried to nerf the loot mechanics give to balance an increase in their spawn rate you would make those mechanics unexciting to encounter, just glorified packsize.

The comment before me is so out of touch with the mode it's baffling. It's silly to judge the success of ruthless by how many streamers play it. Streamers play for an audience, the core PoE audience, and ruthless is supposed to be a departure from that. Ruthless is in its nature a less exciting mode to stream.

It's also silly to claim that ruthless has been written off, it never had any significant dev time to begin with. It has no new content, just a lot of balance tweaks which were slowly worked out over a year or so leading up to its release.

Melee doesn't need more gap closers, you have consecrated path. It's also been one of the best things you can play for multiple leagues; for a while in Crucible the rank 1 trade guy was melee, and the rank 1 SSFR guy last league was also melee.

Map sustain has been so easy this league, you have to be actively trolling your atlas to not progress to reds at a pace that's comfortable for your build. We also have a crazy in-map mechanic that not only makes everyone an MF build, but also contains harvests, beyond, etc.

Ah you're the guy on the discord that tells anyone who's critical or doesn't like something about the mode to "shut up" aren't you? I can imagine that type might find subjective views baffling.

Obviously among the 10's of people who love it; Ruthless can do no wrong. Personally I wanted more from the mode. Its fine if you and a few others find it to hit a sweet spot. Its totally understandable why if it hits your sweet spot you don't want it to be any different, and don't care if it only works for a handful of people. Different strokes for different folks as the old saying goes. Krip also loves it.

If you listen to Krip talking to Johnathan you'll understand that they've basically written it off.

"that ship has kinda sailed" I think is the quote LOL. Not exactly hard to "read between" those lines.

Anyway we see the mode very differently. You see consecrated path being good enough, I see a decision that helped positioning matter (which is one of my bright points about the mode for certain), but also lead to a severe lack of interesting choices, and the elimination of some skill expression and several fun skills that aren't allowed.

As long as YOU have a solution you like, such as Conc Path you're happy and why would anyone else care about choices when you don't care about them right? It kind of like the "melee is fine because Boneshatter exists" viewpoint.

I see severely compounded problems across an entire playstyle a swath of skills that are just downright dumb to chose and you see (presumably) Boneshatter or Shield crush being "good enough" like Conc Path is. (gee I wonder why the melee skills with a ton of baked in damage/less inherent RNG or relatively easy to count on uniques are good enough?)

I see systemic problems and you see "that one guy a couple leagues ago who used a skill that is an exception to the thing you said". The exceptions test the rule. Thanks for that.

BTW Ruthless Crucible #1 is an SRS Guardian, SSF Ruthless Crucible #1 is an RF Jugg HC Ruthless and HC SSF Ruthless are a Stormburst totem Scion and an Explotem jugg respectively.

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alhazred70 wrote:

I see systemic problems and you see "that one guy a couple leagues ago who used a skill that is an exception to the thing you said". The exceptions test the rule. Thanks for that.

BTW Ruthless Crucible #1 is an SRS Guardian, SSF Ruthless Crucible #1 is an RF Jugg HC Ruthless and HC SSF Ruthless are a Stormburst totem Scion and an Explotem jugg respectively.

You are very correct in saying that there aren't enough viable builds in Ruthless, at least from the point of view of being competitive on the ladder and farming actual endgame. Saying this as the #1 Chieftain during SSF Crucible (ExploTudems of course)

I think that's one of the biggeest problems Ruthless faces. It is supposed to be more difficult and limiting, but ends up strangulating build diversity. There's a reason why the top played class on Affliction launch was Guardian with 11% across the entirety of the board a week in, which is down from last season (15%) but still leading by a great margin.

I think we can at least agree with the assessment of the situation. What I disagree with is judging the success of Ruthless based on how many streamers play it. While Ruthless is still Path of Exile, most of the community doesn't care about it and it is much less exciting to watch. As a streamer you have to keep viewers engaged, and finding the occasional Orb of Alchemy just isn't as exciting as mapping in the regular game is. That's why I don't it's a good metric.

The way I understood Johnathan in his talk with Kripparian was that they want to tackle the issues Ruthless currently has, but any dev time diverted to working on Ruthless gets the community angry as we have previously seen with the TotA patch notes. For some reason people really hate the idea of a mode receiving dev care that is not made with them in mind. Is it jealousy? I can't tell.

But yeah.. even as someone who enjoys Ruthless I'm not sure if I'm returning to it. My SSF-experience was that it doesn't respect my time invested as much as the regular game does

Mentioning Streamers is just an easy to see metric, its a metric anyone can see and one that GGG very much is attuned to as well. But its just one of the things I bring up when I'm putting my view across. Personally I feel like Krip Alk and Quin are among the most "try hard" and a mode that makes two of them nope out perfectly and very visibly embodies the mode's failure. And at least Quin and Kripp both talk about game design enthusiastically which also lets us see their reasoning both ways.

To me dismissing the streamer reception of Ruthless is suspicious. It feels like cognitive dissonance "well I don't care if those guys play it anyway". Why dismiss a metric that can help us understand where they made mistakes?

It has to be asked, if even Kripp is no longer playing it (is he going back to it next league? I dunno); when does Ruthless get the Battle Royal/Racing Season treatment?

The old "we're disabling it temporarily to discuss changes and re-implement the mode when we've got it in a better state" death nell.

What are you accusing me of here?Didn't you just call out Jeko for 'attacking anyone with an opposing opinion?'
There's a word for that and I'm sure I can remember it.

I can personally speak to what I said about streaming Ruthless as I have tried to when I was still streaming very regularily. People just don't care much about watching a mode they don't play themselves, and so they'll rather watch someone else do something more interesting.

We agree on the overall assessment. There's no reason to get hostile like that

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ArtCrusade wrote:

What are you accusing me of here?Didn't you just call out Jeko for 'attacking anyone with an opposing opinion?'
There's a word for that and I'm sure I can remember it.

I can personally speak to what I said about streaming Ruthless as I have tried to when I was still streaming very regularily. People just don't care much about watching a mode they don't play themselves, and so they'll rather watch someone else do something more interesting.

We agree on the overall assessment. There's no reason to get hostile like that

man you're taking what i wrote completely wrong. Everybody has moments of cognitive dissonance I'm not singling you out specifically either its just that every time I mention them multiple ruthless people want to throw that out. I'm just asking the question; why throw away a useful metric?

Anyway my bad, I've been in too many of these arguments about this subject and am lumping them all together.

I don't think I am misreading it. You state that I am dismissing the "big streamers don't play it, therefore it has failed" argument because - why exactly?

If there's anything to take away from streamers not picking it up and playing it is that it's boring to watch. Regular vs Ruthless is like Formula 1 vs Soapbox Racing.

I'd be more receptive to you calling that cognitive dissonance if you at least made an effort to explain which cognitions I presumably have clash together and cannot be allowed to mingle. The way you phrased it just sounds very dismissive to what I argued.

Either way, you acknowledge it and so it's fine. Back to normal discussion