Why losing the map, the waystone, and all bonus mods shouldn't be standard

POE1: Solo play: 6x attempts to clear, less loot. Monsters deal less damage and have less hitpoints. Safer, more room for error, but less reward.

Party play: Remove 1 attempt per player added, monsters deal more damage per player and have more health per player, some mechanics target every player, but more and better loot drops. Higher risk, but higher reward.

Both routes are perfectly viable, and you never feel punished for choosing one over the other.

POE2: Solo play: 6x portals for loot, but if you ignore vendor trash (blues to sell for gold) you would struggle to make use of more than 2 if even that. Lose the map on death, and lose all bonus mechanics tied to that map tile, and forced to path through it anyway later to keep progressing. You will always be the primary target of everything around, and can only control fights by your own abilities, which will all diminish. Very high risk, minimal reward, no room for error or network/pc issues.

Group play: remove one portal per player added, but they were only for carrying loot anyway. Radically more loot and better loot per player added. Each added player is another direction monster interest will drift, splitting up the damage and control between more extremely limited health pools. Many more sources of crowd control available that can be cycled to work around diminishing returns. Increasing power level from player ability cross-interactions radically outpaces monster difficulty scaling from added players. So long as at least one player survives to complete the map, no potential loot or mechanics are lost. Much lower risk, MUCH higher rewards, radically more room for network/pc issues.

You are punished for playing solo instead of playing in a group, and punished hard.

Now, riddle me this. In a player base that is going to be absolutely loaded with introverts who want to just settle in for a nice quiet evening at their own leisure and fiddle around with a wildly complex character building system, what in the name of Sin were you thinking in making a game where it is objectively incorrect and frustrating to play solo at your own leisure?

If you want to keep the current setup as part of future ruthless leagues, which I have for the record seen a small minority asking for, that makes sense to me. However, if you check peoples challenges completed from settlers to see how many people are sporting blue numbers as oppose to how many are sporting red numbers, I think you will find it is radically tilted towards the blue. Please consider not alienating an enormous portion of the player base by planting ruthless-appropriate atlas progression as standard.

Path of Exile 2 has the core of what could be one of the best ARPGs ever made, so please, can we have it in a format with the ability to opt out of mechanics that exist for no apparent purpose other than to frustrate and punish most solo players?

I do hope they change their mind on this. This is currently my only gripe with the game. I don't even care if thing that kills me is random and unfair; I would just like to be able to have 6 tries at it.

Maybe they feel 6 tries undermines the development of the difficulty of the game but I felt it made an otherwise hardcore experience approachable for most of the game's audience as the hardcore community is VERY small compared to the rest of the playerbase.

Yea it is excessively punitive. I've thrown so many bodies at Aul before. It helped to learn mechanics bit by bit granted you had enough sulphite. This new thing is too absolute.

Nope, 1 portal should stay, as long as the ridiculous one shots in the endgame get fixed and the deaths actually feel like it´s my fault it is totally fair, it one of those things that PoE 2 actually did right, no more bow cucks in full rarity gear dieing 5 times in a map but bringing the loot you get in 20, now they wanna go glass cannon they have to deal with the consequences, people here keep asking to keep the tedious mechanics that bring nothing to the game and raging over actual fixes saying it makes the game easier, and then ask to change the actual things that make the game hard (in a good way). PoE 2 did many things wrong in my book, but this wasnt one of them, just 1 hour ago one guy was asking to remove the limit on support skills wich is actually a good change too (and can even be bypassed in some ways).

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MakaveliPT#7753 wrote:

Nope, 1 portal should stay, as long as the ridiculous one shots in the endgame get fixed and the deaths actually feel like it´s my fault it is totally fair, it one of those things that PoE 2 actually did right, no more bow cucks in full rarity gear dieing 5 times in a map but bringing the loot you get in 20, now they wanna go glass cannon they have to deal with the consequences, people here keep asking to keep the tedious mechanics that bring nothing to the game and raging over actual fixes saying it makes the game easier, and then ask to change the actual things that make the game hard (in a good way). PoE 2 did many things wrong in my book, but this wasnt one of them, just 1 hour ago one guy was asking to remove the limit on support skills wich is actually a good change too (and can even be bypassed in some ways).

^ this guy gets it.

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MakaveliPT#7753 wrote:

Nope, 1 portal should stay, as long as the ridiculous one shots in the endgame get fixed and the deaths actually feel like it´s my fault it is totally fair, it one of those things that PoE 2 actually did right, no more bow cucks in full rarity gear dieing 5 times in a map but bringing the loot you get in 20, now they wanna go glass cannon they have to deal with the consequences, people here keep asking to keep the tedious mechanics that bring nothing to the game and raging over actual fixes saying it makes the game easier, and then ask to change the actual things that make the game hard (in a good way). PoE 2 did many things wrong in my book, but this wasnt one of them, just 1 hour ago one guy was asking to remove the limit on support skills wich is actually a good change too (and can even be bypassed in some ways).

Thats why I want this to be a ruthless mechanic.

You may like it this way, and an awful lot of people absolutely don't. There is no reason for one or the other to be enforced on everybody, that simply alienates a large portion of the player base.

Even losing the affixes to the node is punishing as hell.

The only node with a ritual in all of the visible map? too late it's gone because the map spawned porcupine crabs.

I'm currently debating quitting the game because of this mechanic. It absolutely must change!

I already quit the game for some time because of the endgame mechanics.. Its too punishing (not in the good way) and most of the time its not even my mistake that i died ( cant do nothing about mobs that shoot me outside of my screen and kill me with 1 hit..). Losing map, drops, node affixes, experience and most important my time... I think that only the most Hardcore players actually survive this on the long term. As much i enjoy the whole campaign, i hate the endgame so much.

+1
Hopefully they listen. But we'll probably find out after the holidays, unless we get some kind of new "What we're working on" news post.