Quitting for now due to Citadels

I absolutely LOVE Poe 2 and am in a situation where I can't go back to Poe 1 because of how much better Poe 2 is to me, but I can't keep playing Poe 2 because of the following. The moment I learned that getting top the pinnacle boss required finding 3 randomly placed citadels, I instantly lost all desire to play. If the distance between rewards is too large or too random, players lose the desire to play(obviously GGG understands this extremely well).

I got to level 90 doing juiced T15 maps and I never die now. If I want to find the citadels, I have to pick a random direction and use low level maps to "explore" and hope that after 30 hours of doing t10s, which give nothing now and provide ZERO challenge, I will find a citadel.

And since the time cost to finding all 3 is so absurdly high, I will of course watch a video on the pinnacle fight because what kind of insane person grinds for 100 hours to get 3 keys to attempt a fight with 1-shot mechanics without looking at a video.

There has to be a way to "explore" and still feel like you are doing challenging maps. It would also be really stupid to use your t15 maps to explore when none of it is juiced or challenging. I REALLY hope GGG is aware of this critical issue. I know most people aren't at this part of the end game.

Anyways, I just wanted to be another voice speaking to this issue since I went from playing constantly over Christmas break to instantly not wanting to play because of the above issue.

One idea I can think of is you have "regions" that you enter, which reveals everything in the region. Regions have towers and the region is revealed and you can insert precursors right away to influence the entire region. Regions can have implicit modifiers as well, so you still feel like you're exploring, but its region by region instead of map by map. You then get a dopamine hit when you reveal a region, see interesting points of interest, then move there. You then feel like you're traversing a region to explore the next one. Imagine discovering a region that has perma -40% fire res/+40% magic find(i.e a morridor style map), and you just want to survive to get to the other side to get to a different region. Or maybe you farm the region and deal with the risk.

Just some random ideas.

Yeah I think the answer has to be clustering some content near each other. I like the idea of regions, we already have biomes so a similar concept already exists. But I think both can exist at the same time, biomes being the physical maps, and regions being more like a “biome for mechanics”.

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and regions being more like a “biome for mechanics”.

Exactly! Imagine having a region currency to roll more mods on the region too. You could have interesting mechanics/mods like "A shade stalks you", so every map in that region has a wandering shade that can't be killed but moves slowly(but it increases magic find a lot).
It just feels like it'd be better if regions had implicit qualities. Right now it feels like exploring is uninteresting and random and I was trying to think of why that is. Part of it is after you've seen 10 deserts, they are all "the same" desert. It also feels designers could then create lots of different types of regions that have their own personality(and implicit modifiers).

I want that feeling of "oh (@!$ I'm entering a morridor map that gives -20% max fire res). Right now you just instantly move between a bland dessert to a bland forest.

I like the idea of biomes lowering resists. as long as its not max res. So you have to build several sets of gear depending on the biome you're in if you want to live.

Also the citadels are like this for a lot of people. Im close to 90 and farming t15s and finding none either going straight out. I would like to learn the fight myself but if it takes me 2-3 weeks to find 1 citadel idk.

I guess if you can play this game 12-16 hours a day maybe you're the target audience for this type of gameplay but thats just not me i reckon.

just found my first citadel by just exploring. Im lv 89 and this was the first time i actively searched for it. Finding those things cant be that difficult, it wont take that many hours, BUT the amount of BORING TEDIOUS CONTENT to reach them is just too much for my brain.

And on top of that i failed the map. Died to the boss, it was an iron citadel with the boss from act 1 and it was so long when i last fought him, i totally forgot how fast those ice-light pillars come down. I got hit by the first one, insanly slowed, slow rolled away, of course into the next one, couldnt avoid cause slowed, just died.

Guess what... MAP STAYED FAILED... you cannot enter again, you are done. So even if you invest all that time an loss of braincells from boring content, if you die, if you crash or whatever makes you fail the map.. HAVE FUN SEARCHING FOR ANOTHER ONE.

I can steamroll through maps 15+ - 18, i have all my atlas map points, 8/10 altals boss points, i did my 4th ascendency yesterday, i can theoretically grind 4 floor trials for fun and loot. I want to say that im BORED trying to reach those special bosses, which are the only interesting content left. But oh no, one small mistake at the citadel and have fun wasting more hours of your life away. The amount of REAL LIFE TIME that you waste is not that big as you said, but its still too much.

I really dont want to just buy fragments, thats not fun, i want to earn at least my first set by myself, but man this is too tedious.