T17's Are Complete and Total Design Failure

TLDR : T17 bad

- The difficulty : In the league reveal, T17s maps were announced as a bridge between pinacle bosses and Ubers. And I see why they said that, because if you get the 1 in 50 map that doesn't have any "bad" mod, it's actually not that hard. The problem is that it only takes a single bad map mod to make the map awful and unplayable.

- The Mods : I can't stress enough how much I hate the mods. They're terrible. I hate when a single mod makes a whole archetype invalid, for instance the mod that makes totems redirect damage to you, or the mod that makes you take 20% increased damage per ally nearby, or the charge disabling mods, you get my point. But what I hate even more are mods that are there just to say "screw you", like Union of souls. Yeah totally so fun to kill a couple white packs and after that all monsters in the map have 10 times the hp of the boss itself), or the "do no damage during 4 seconds every 10 seconds" (so fun when combined with temp chains), or the marked for death mod (cannot recovery life +30% inc dmg taken for 10 seconds) which procs every single time you kill the adds the boss spawns. I'm not going to list them all, but I want to insist on how utterly stupid it is that the difficulty is raised tenfold just because of a single mod on the map.

- Fighting the map : Because of that, I don't feel like my goal when entering the map is to fight a boss and play around it's mechanics. I feel like i'm fighting and playing around the map mods that will screw me over inevitably. Very often I end up purposfully tanking boss mechanics I could've have avoided because the degen ground all around is much more deadly.

- Visual clarity: Atrocious. From monsters who are much bigger than in normal maps to the multitude of different ground degen and small mechanics you can barely see until it's too late (hello petrification statues into drowning orb). When there are 10 dangerous mechanics at once on screen, all the "weight" of fighting a tough boss is gone. I want to be able to see the ground when there are 40 packs of revenants in the map, but I just can't. This is a poor way to deliver challenge.

- The numbers : The map mods in my opinion are straight up bad design. However the numbers themselves are also poorly balanced. 90% reduced aura effect, -20% max res, 800% Increased crit chance etc... Id rather have base bosses being more challenging than having to ramp up the mod numbers.

- The Rewards : I fail to see the point of having to a bunch of these T17 maps to access each Uber. I've only done a couple and I don't want to do any more. They're maddening. The number of fragments dropped by the boss varies with quant, which means you're encouraged to spec into map mod effect nodes, which make the maps tremendously harder, and sometimes for nothing because a 220% quant map can still drop only 1 fragment.

- Player Agency : All of this leads me to my final point, which is that player agency is nowhere to be found. All the CCs from map monsters, slows, stuns, degen ground, mods that brick your build, unfair mechanics make the experience terrible. My only recourse to make the map easier is either to cheese it with a thousand shrines and sulphite deposite buffs, or to straight up disable mods with a scarab that i'm yet to find a single one of and I don't want to do that, because I don't want to feel like my character is weak without temporary crutches against content that is meant to be a bridge from map bosses that can barely harm me and die in a few seconds. And then coming to T17, I feel like I'm being punished just for interacting with the maps for a reward that's not satisfying.

I just don't really understand how having 3 bosses just mindlessly spamming ground effects and instadeath AOE's in a small enclosed space is supposed to be bridging content to ubers

Anyone that can easily farm these is at most just mildly inconvenienced at having to do their chores for their fragments and everyone that just wanted their fifth map slot gets to eat dirt?

No, absolutely not. What a bad decision.

I've never been interested in fighting ubers. I don't build that well. Its not a skill issue. It is a gear issue. Taking a few looks at what T17's are like, its clear to see that GGG hasn't got the faintest clue on how to deliver a skillful challenge so they just throw a bunch of random multipliers and debuffs at the wall to see if people could clear it.

Some kind of answer on this would be nice.

Cannot agree to this more, but... the devs are going to have it their way because it's their baby, they've came up with it, they've worked on it, and even if it's going to be pushed back it's just going to eventually return like Archnemesis.

can't help but agree with everything you've said, these maps are the most poorly designed content I have ever encountered.

They are both unrewarding and far too difficult. It feels like a massive F you to the player base.

Whoever decided they are a "middle ground" clearly doesn't play the game and I've been farming them like a madman most of the league

I thought T17s are basically community made content if you bought supporter pack. So why do you blame GGG instead of the supporters? My friend also bought the pack and we planned the mods together (In the mod editor) to make the map as difficult as it possible.

Well, I think each time GGG delegates to design the entity of the game to the community as reward for the pack or winning the event, the thing becomes an imbalanced OP :) Players and community != game developers. Fortunately at least they don't give root/admin access to the database as reward :)

They need to get rid of t17. Literally no one asked for this. Giga out of touch with their player base. Literally rare mobs tankier than the ubers lmao. Super unfun and in order to beat these t17's you need a giga tank build. The average build is not clearing a t17 like wtf.

Genuinely the least fun I've ever had in the game. They keep changing how the maps are handled, but for the love of god, just let us fucking roll the maps normally.

I think they're fine, What i don't understand is why so many people think they should be able to clear them when its not content that just any build on even decent gear can do casually.

Though i do not think all of the items locked behind them should be after experiencing the difficulty jump from t16>17 but if there are items locked behind it most of it should be new-content not stuff we were already using or dependent on.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

I think they're fine, What i don't understand is why so many people think they should be able to clear them when its not content that just any build on even decent gear can do casually.

Complaining about them and how steep of a stat check they are is completely valid in my opinion especially because it is tied to very important things such as your map slot. Since scarabs provide the juice in your maps its not reasonable to tell someone their build straight up doesn't get to participate in the endgame past 16 maps. GGG's stated intention was for this to be "bridging" content to ubers. As my original post explains, I think they've failed in that. There's nothing bridging about 3 bosses in a confined room mindlessly spamming ground effects and aoe attacks. There's no skillful challenge in actually having zero clear space in the boss arena so I'm forced to tank boss attacks I'd have otherwise been able to easily avoid. Its not a skill issue. Its a stat check.

I haven't ran a 17 since the patch so I don't know yet if they feel any better than they did but I had to roll a LOT of chaos on mine just to make them doable because the mods were too oppressive in a way that you couldn't skillfully play around them. They either turned your build off or they didn't. Your character could either survive or it couldn't. No ifs ands or buts.