Path of Exile 3.26 Feedback

I'm a long time PoE player with a habit of beating all endgame content and completing 40 challenges on my own merit in every league. Here's my feedback to GGG after finishing the Mercenary league. Not claiming to speak for anybody but myself.

Warning: Long text with a TL;DR at the end.

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Mercenaries

This is the best league mechanic ever. I don't know why it took so long to add one of the signature features of D2 to the game inspired by D2, but it's finally here. And it's awesome! A personal companion that adds abilities that synergize with your build, or helps to compensate for something that your build lacks. And you don't need to group with other players for it. Loving it! Definitely keep and add to the core game.

Add more mercs with different abilities, especially more Scions (Str/Dex/Int). Fix the extreme abuse cases (ex: Doryani's Prototype).

Too bad about the lack of testing and tuning that ruined the first week of the league. Things like that keep happening at the start of every league. For whatever reason, you guys just don't like the concept of "design lock". You keep making changes up to the last minute before the release. And that makes it impossible to properly test anything. You use the players to test new content when it goes live. The first week or every new league is the actual beta testing. This is bad. This approach has resulted in a number of disastrous league launches in the past. Why do you keep doing it?

Adjust your pre-launch schedule. Stop making changes (other than fixes) and spend some time testing the content before releasing it. Most of the worst bugs and mis-tuning cases are instantly noticeable, if only anybody bothers to do some testing.

Secrets of the Atlas

New content is always good. Obviously, this is the first part of a new story arc. But I already don't like where this is going. "Eagon" is Sirus, isn't he? The worst endgame boss ever designed. The whiny invulnerable-teleport-off-screen-DIE-bullshit guy. And you want to bring him back. Please, for the love of Chris Wilson, stop making new versions of that terrible encounter!

The new bosses (other than the mini-Sirus) are OK. Especially the visual design. Pretty much all new endgame bosses designed after Sirus look very good. That black-on-black atrocity was the rock bottom, and everything looks great compared to that. However, one of them has 3 long invulnerability phases (where you have to pick up roses). That's 2 too many. One such phase would have been enough. They are also very undertuned, complete pushovers.

Zana wants to destroy the Atlas. I guess we are heading towards the PoE 2 Delve-style endless Atlas, tablets, etc. I'm not opposed to that. But you better keep the Atlas Tree we have in PoE 1. The PoE 2 version is terrible. It's a fetus of a real tree. (Just like PoE 2 is a fetus of a real game.) And keep the Favorite map mechanic. PoE 2 endgame is 90% filled with bad map layouts. I want it to be 90% filled with my favorite maps.

Quality of Life Improvements

Thank you very much for all the QoL changes in the recent leagues! Finally, it feels like the players are getting some love.

The Currency Exchange is the best thing since sliced bread! But please add a trading system like that for other items too. There are so many engaging mechanics in this game, I can't blame anybody for not responding to trade tells. We just need a way to sell and buy everything without disrupting each other's gameplay.

There is one problematic QoL change with UI highlighting in 3.26 that ruins crafting and bugs the Atlas: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3795076
Please fix that. Don't highlight items that are filtered out.

Betrayal Rework

This is way too slow. Even with all the Atlas nodes, scarabs, and all Syndicate members being friends with each other. It takes way too long to get enough intelligence for a safehouse. Speed it up!

Ctrl-clicking Jun should bring up the Syndicate map.

And what have you done to Catarina? She's basically free loot now. Nerfed too much! Fewer phases is good, but there has to be some challenge. Buff her life and damage without bringing back the repetitive phases.

Outstanding Issues with Other Mechanics

Delve: Add a voltaxic generator craft or an atlas passive to make mobs spawn faster. Waiting for them to spawn is such a waste of time!

Bestiary: Show the monster type somewhere when fighting/capturing them. Yellow/red beasts show their useless randomly generated names instead of the monster type. You never know what you've just caught (except for the very first time). Also, make Einhar capture them faster. Standing around for 10 sec waiting for him to do his thing is silly.

Archnemesis: Remove "Soul Eater" and "Creates Frost Walls and Flees". Those mods are extremely bad when they spawn in certain league mechanics, such as Delve, Blight, Ultimatum, Ritual.

T17: There is a good reason why pinnacle Atlas bosses have their modless arenas. Giving them regular mods, especially any form of attack speed or increased AoE, would be too imbalanced. Whoever designed T17 clearly didn't think about the consequences of buffing those bosses with the super nasty mods that those maps can roll. Or, more likely, the bosses and the map mods were designed by two different devs who did not communicate. As a result, we have to spend a lot of chaos orbs rerolling the map to avoid making the bosses unbeatable. Make T17 boss arenas separate areas with no mods.

Animation Queueing: This issue has been in PoE forever. Atziri, Izaro, Shaper, etc - all multi-phase bosses do it occasionally. But the T17 bosses with haste mods make it a lot more noticeable. They can queue series of attack animations. And when it's time to transition to the next phase of the encounter they become invulnerable but keep doing the queued animations until they finish them all. Nightmare of Lycia is the most glaring example of this. With +speed mods she can keep spamming you with all her abilities for 10-20 sec after reaching 50%, while invulnerable, before finally doing her lightning phase. This is just stupid. Cancel all pending (queued) animations when it's time for a phase transition!

Reflect: Why is reflect still in this game? There is no reflect in PoE 2. Meaning that you don't consider it a part of the game's identity. You acknowledged that it was a bad mechanic and didn't include it in the new game. Please remove it from PoE 1 too.

Corrupted Blood: For a vast majority of builds this mechanic is a binary switch - either you become immune to it, or it destroys you. What purpose does it serve? CB immunity is just a 'tax' that we have to pay. For no real reason. Please get rid of Corrupted Blood!

Other Issues

Currency Tab: It's been years since the weird decision to swap Divine and Exalted orbs. And nobody had time to fix the currency tab? Exalt is still sitting right next to the Mirror. Come on!

Exalted Shards: Influenced armor sets are still vendoring for Exalted shards which are worth less than Chaos orbs. They should be worth whole Exalts instead of shards. Get rid of Exalted shards already. They serve no purpose anymore.

Fractured Fossil: It was created before there was fracturing in the game. It doesn't fracture items, it splits them. There is now a Fracturing Orb too that actually fractures. Rename Fractured fossil to Splitting.

The Goblin Pet: The worst MTX ever created! Terrible idea. You KNOW that it's extremely annoying. Yet you refuse to do anything about it because some people paid money for it, and they think they bought a right to annoy everybody. By letting this abuse go unchecked you are promoting anti-social behavior. Here's a very simple solution: make this shit audible only to its owner! They can enjoy it all day long - without forcing it upon the rest of us.


PoE 1 vs PoE 2

(This will definitely hurt some feelings. But you need to face the truth, even if it hurts.)

For the last 6 years you've been focusing most of your efforts and resources on this new game. PoE 1 has been treated as a red-haired stepchild and a testing ground for PoE 2 ideas. Untold amount of new content for PoE 1 has not been created. New releases were taking longer and longer, to the point of almost a YEAR between 3.25 and 3.26.

And for what? A turtle-paced game with 3 acts, a dozen of new classes, severely castrated crafting and itemization, and almost no endgame content? You basically went 12 years back in time to the first versions of PoE. Why? To satisfy some streamer/influencer's feeling of nostalgia? You could just run a special event similar to Phrecia, with the original 1.1 mechanics and content, for a month or two. But to play like that all the time?? Who in their right mind would want that when there is a game like today's PoE 1?

I can totally see why 3.26 was delayed, repeatedly. Imagine if it was released last November as planned, with these awesome Mercenaries. And then we'd see the mess called 'PoE II 0.1.0 EA'. Ironically, it contained something entirely different with the same name. A class that brought modern assault weapons into a medieval ARPG. No, crossbows don't work like that. It may have been a funny meme back in 2019, but the novelty has long worn off. All you did was ruin the immersion.

Anyway, after the initial hype about PoE 2, everybody realized that there was no substance to it. The shiny shell was empty. So then it became an even worse idea to release 3.26 - it would completely kill off what was left of the PoE 2 buzz.

I remember watching some streamer's video back in January or February where they gushed over the additions and improvements made to PoE 2 in the first couple of months after the initial release. That very optimistic person predicted PoE 2 catching up to PoE 1 in build diversity and the amount of content 'in a matter of a few months'. Little did he know that all those things have been in development for years, they were not made from scratch after December 2024. And it will take YEARS AND YEARS to get anywhere near the level of today's PoE 1.

Perhaps we all needed to see PoE 2 to realize just how good of a game PoE 1 really is. At this point there is simply no comparison. PoE 1 is so much better than PoE 2, it's not even funny. It brings a smile to my face when I see yet another post from a player who discovered this game and fell in love with it after first checking out PoE 2 because of all the hype. The best thing about PoE 2 right now is that it brings new players to PoE 1!

Now, my main question is: WHY DO WE NEED POE 2?

I don't see anything in PoE 2 that could not have been done in PoE 1. We could have PoE 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 by now. With a new graphic engine, new models, new animations, a bunch of new or reworked classes, new mechanics and mechanical changes, new support and socket system, new campaign acts instead of A1-5 redux, etc etc etc. None of that required making a new game from scratch and abandoning a decade worth of content and build diversity.

Why is there a separate (but similar) game with its own separate development cycle, competing with the best ARPG on the market and taking resources from it? You are struggling against yourselves. Just merge them already! Add the new things from PoE 2 to PoE 1 and enjoy the best of both worlds.


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TL;DR

- The best league mechanic ever!
- Test new content before releasing it.
- Fix the outstanding issues with the core game.
- PoE 1 is far better than PoE 2.