A game once taking pride in giving the players agency, now puts them in a mud pipe: Tier 17 maps.

Currently the market is seeing a first time phenomenon: Headhunter is 10 divines, while Nimis hovers in the ~90-100 range. Tier 0 uniques, allegedly the chase items of the game, are taking a free fall in price, while uber-boss gated uniques that see demand are skyrocketing in price. Tier 17 maps and their intent of being a "stepping stone" to Ubers has caused a level of friction that affects the entire game.

What set Path of Exile apart from the rest of the ARPG genre was the level of freedom and agency players had; the Atlas tree being the zenith of this idea's implementation. Players engaged with the game's content by customizing it to their personal preferences through the Atlas tree. The idea was that you can play anything, even though some decisions might be strategically better than others, depending on the league mechanic, map device options, the build metagame that shapes the market, and build choice of each player. In other words, the structure of the game turned the Atlas passives tree into a unique macro-decision-making tool that no other game can boast. And aligning your build with your Atlas tree decision has been one of the most rewarding feelings in this game yet.

However, in 3.24 that isn't the case. What determines a player's decisions isn't their own agency but how to juice those few T17s: and getting to that point doesn't involve player freedom either: scarab nodes, league mechanic nodes and +1 tier map nodes all feel mandatory to take if you want to sustain an initial push. Mandatory atlas tree points that need to be spent in order to progress the game. At the same time, Necropolis is a mechanic that interacts badly with this idea, since it is also mandatory and makes all maps harder, making the early map push feel like fighting a wave of mud inside a pipe that has no crossroads.

Doing T17 maps isn't the pinnacle of fun either. If mobs required building defenses, that content would have been fine; however, combined with the layout being near-consistently a maze feels like a developer insecurity, as if players won't trying to juice and upgrade their difficulty anyway. However, in order for players also not do that, the T17 mod pool also has its heat cranked up. So in order to fight for those rewarding strategies, players have to arrive with either a coordinated party... or take more atlas nodes that buff the players, like the Niko ones.

If one wants to avoid the T17 strategy, then the bossing and uber bossing part of the game is also gutted. The nerf to Pathfinder makes Dawnbreaker fishing worthless, and Nimis is in demand but too rare. The rest of the loot table faces these two categories of problems: either worthless, or too rare. Simply put, it's another part of the game that has been taken to faulty extremes.

The Atlas tree and the player agency it provides is one of the core things that make Path of Exile not good, but great. In many other online games, the logic of the metagame is "play x, do y, profit". Macro-level decision making is thrown out of the window, or is watered down to levels of simplicity that can bore a lot of people. But what made PoE great, even in weird leagues like Kalandra or Crucible, is that you could still make an educated build choice, an educated content farm choice, and still enjoy the game. In Necropolis, you either play x, do y, and profit, or not. And on top of that, getting there has more friction than necessary. I don't want the state of T17 maps to decide which content I run. I want to be the one to decide which content I run, and in which maps I do so.

If PoE really does have player agency in mind, then the content the players choose to run (assuming T17s can be turned into a choice rather than a more-difficult-than-ubers mandate), then the ways that modify said content shouldn't be mandatory to pick from the table of options. Currently-running-League nodes on the Atlas tree is not a good idea. Map nodes that accelerate early progress on the tree are not a good idea. Scarab nodes, when scarabs have gone global, are not a good idea. Even allowing all league options on the map device is not a good idea, because that takes away from the developer customizing a league experience. T17 maps not being on the Atlas itself, meaning we cannot favor them, removes even more potential interactions this type of content could have.

And heating up the mod pool while mazing-up the layout of the map isn't making the content harder; it merely annoys players into submission. Until they arrive with a full build and start their real farm and face the annoying layout generation and even more annoying mod-rolling shenanigans. Which btw, should allow all sorts of mod rolling, not just chaos orbs.

Atlas nodes need to be content-specific, powerful and interactive. T17 maps have to feel like a choice that leads to a meaningful gameplay loop, rather than a mandate. At least, in my opinion.