Delve league feedback and the state of the game

Warning: extremely long post.

I finally completed 40 challenges in this league (all on my own, without buying any). Here's my thoughts on it and the current state of PoE in general.


The Delve League

1. The main mechanic

Delve is awesome. The best league mechanic ever. Adding it to the core game is a no-brainer. Congratulations on this major success! Looking forward to delving in the upcoming leagues.

Of course, some more improvements are needed:

- Why is sulphite not shared between the characters on the same account in the same league?? Why do you insist that we delve and map on the same character? It makes no sense. Different builds are better suited for different tasks. Making different characters for MF speed mapping, Lab running, boss killing, etc - is a completely normal practice. And the more characters the players level - the more time they spend in the game. Share the sulphite! It would be a good thing for both the players and GGG.

- Sulphite balance is far from perfect. One T16 map with +100% quantity pays for about one length 2-3 delve at depth ~300. That's too much mapping for too little delving. Either the maps need to drop much more sulphite, or delving at 300+ should cost much less sulphite. Adjust the balance towards more delving, by a lot.

2. Crafting

Fossils are awesome. Not much to add here. I absolutely love delve crafting. The only obvious improvement would be stacking. Make fossils and empty resonators stackable. And, of course, if you make a new premium tab for this stuff - it would totally be worth paying for.

3. Bosses

I generally like the 3 new boss encounters. But:

- Scaling all of their damage from physical (Ahuatotli and Kurgal are entirely physical, Aul is phys converted to cold) makes random map mods too deadly. The difficulty of the same boss at the same depth can vary wildly depending on the random mods, much more so than the difficulty of the regular map bosses. Cut the extra damage mods in half. Make the difficulty curve smoother.

- The boss becoming untargetable/invulnerable but continuing to attack you for a couple of seconds during phase transitions is BAD! Aul is the worst offender here. He can easily kill you during the phase transitions when you can't fight back. Izaro in the Lab was originally like that: he would queue a bunch of animations and keep attacking the player despite becoming invulnerable before leaving the room. It was changed: now you can hit Izaro and leech from him regardless of him becoming invulnerable. The delve bosses (mainly Aul) need to be changed in a similar manner.

- Aul is way too rare, even after the patch that supposedly made him more common. Yes, he's the 'pinnacle of the delve content', blah blah blah. But he already spawns only at T16+ depths, hits like a truck and can almost never have the base damage/life values (good luck finding him modless and below 400!). This current combination of rarity and difficulty is not reasonable. Make Aul more common.

4. Trash mobs

I absolutely hate the delve trash! It feels like you took the very worst from Abyss and Incursion leagues, the mobs that the players hated the most, and then designed new mobs to be even more annoying.

- Mobs that go invisible/invulnerable and take cheap shots at you right before or right after doing it. Bad! Invulnerable bosses are bad enough, but invulnerable trash is just retarded, unfair, un-fun. Invulnerability is a terrible mechanic. Stop using it! Get rid of this crap! Replace it with something else.

- Turongs! Where do I start... Way too much life, too much damage. Nerf them (more).

- Things that hurt you after they die: explosive suicidal bugs, ice balls that jump on top of you and shoot projectiles when they die, etc. Are you trying to kill off leech based builds? Damaging the player when he can't fight back is a bad design. Cut those things. Make them either weaker or less common.

- Bloodlines and Nemesis: some of the mods are absolutely retarded in the delve environment. Heralds of the Obelisk with 1 mob lost somewhere in the darkness. Explosive Bearers and Volatiles in tight spaces. Immortal Allies hiding behind a rock/wall/pillar. Soul Eater with an (almost) endless supply of corpses. Lightning Mirage - OMG fuck that thing!! These mods need to be disabled. They just don't work properly in delves.

5. End-delve encounters

I like the variety and some of the designs. But most of them need a lot of polish.

- Most of the encounters at the end of the delve are too long. It feels like... Elreon missions. Boring and pointless. If I can survive the trash waves for 20 sec - I can survive them for 2 minutes, or how ever long it takes for the final wave to show up.

- Most of the time, after you win the encounter, something else shows up and tries to kill you. Some random trash from side tunnels, or, the worst case, a pack of devourers that for some reason ignore you until you clear the room and start looting. This is not good. Make all trash within X radius of the room aggro and path in when the crawler reaches its destination. Or make everything within X radius despawn when the encounter is won. But those post-win stragglers really need to go.

- The crawler is a death trap! It becomes clickable too early, when there are still enemies around. Clicking on it while trying to run through the middle of the room can be deadly. Don't enable it until all enemies are dead and all harmful ground effects have expired. Or make it require Ctrl-click to activate.

6. The 'sulphite re-balance' debacle

There is a communication issue between GGG and the players. For some reason you are not being honest with us when it comes to post-launch changes. That fake 'poll' in Bestiary was disgusting. Adding two new rooms in Incursion and trying to sell that as an improvement was disappointing. But that was nothing compared to the Quarry nerf a.k.a 'Sulphite re-balance' in Delve.

Remember that part of Delve announcement?

"

Your progress is only limited by the power of your character build.

Not limited by RNG, such as the map drop rate? An alternative to the map grind? It sounded too good to be true. And yet it was true. For whole 2 weeks. Long enough to sell a lot of supporter packs.

Then came the nerf. But you tried to disguise it as an improvement (again!). Even when it was announced, it sounded like you would increase the sulphite amount in maps to make mapping more rewarding than the RNG-free Quarry grind. I remember all the happy comments under that post, everybody understood it that way.

And then the reality hit. Saying that the communication from GGG was misleading would be saying nothing. Mapping was made 'more rewarding' by making the alternative not rewarding at all. Wow. That was perhaps the biggest disappointment in my 3 years of playing PoE. I felt like I was deceived, cheated, lied to. I was about to post a huge F U to GGG and quit this game for good, but decided to sleep on it. And luckily, in the morning there was a post from Chris and an emergency 're-re-balance' patch. It still left the non-mapping alternative dead, but at least it made mapping viable for delving.

I understand that you didn't intend to create a true alternative to mapping, you still wanted us to grind maps, you simply overlooked how easy it was to find sulphite in the pre-map areas. But why can't you just be honest and say something like, 'Sorry guys, we didn't mean to let you bypass maps and just delve. We need to nerf this'? Why are you so afraid to call a nerf what it is? You would rather look incompetent? 'We were assuming that players were playing at approximately the equivalent depth in the mine that corresponded to the same difficulty in the atlas.' (quote) - you can't seriously pretend that you didn't know that everybody was getting sulphite from the Quarry, even your favorite streamers did it.

I hope the backlash was a wake up call and this doesn't happen again.

7. Progress spam

Whose bright idea was the league-wide notification about somebody reaching every single depth, solo and otherwise? That is beyond stupid and annoying! Who could possibly care about every single depth? I could understand every 100. But EVERY SINGLE ONE?!

Even if you didn't expect the players to get as deep as they did, depth 600 for the endgame challenge means that you intended to spam us with at least 1200 (!!) of those messages. What the hell is wrong with you, GGG?!

Not to mention that after somebody got to depth X, claiming that another player was 'the first to reach' depth Y < X is a nonsense. If that first player passed through depth Y without stopping, it doesn't mean that the second player should get credit for simply stopping there. It's not what 'first' means.

And what irked me the most, you ignored all complaints about this spam and refused to do anything about it. Simply turning those notifications off at some point would go a long way towards repairing the damage. But you chose to keep this spam going through the entire league. And I will choose not to support you when the time comes for the next one if this spam keeps happening.

Overall

Despite a few negative aspects, this is still the best league ever. I give it 7/10, with deductions for the sulphite-related issues, invulnerable trash, and in-game spam. All other leagues to date were less good.


Path of Exile 3.4

While new content is mostly good and interesting, the game balance seems to be lost.

1. Clear speed meta

This is just silly now. What started as builds that could clear trash fast at the cost of a lot of actions per second, has evolved into annihilating the whole screen by just running through it while using 1 mouse button. What's the point of having monster abilities if they never get to use them because they explode before they even see the player? Stop the madness.

When killing 1 trash mob is enough to start a chain reaction that kills everything on the screen - you know the game is broken. Coincidentally, the word 'broken' is also a part of the name of the item mainly responsible for it.

And aren't movement skills meant for, you know, movement? As opposed to using nothing but movement skills while auto-proccing damaging skills at insane rates.

Chain explosions doing unreasonable amounts of AoE damage and proccing multiple skills from 1 skill are the two main reasons why the clear speed meta is out of control. And it's destroying the game balance.

2. Aurabots

As if they were not OP enough, they got buffed! And now the difference they make is just absurd. Things that are very hard (or even impossible) for most builds solo become trivial with an addition of an aurabot. It may have been not so visible in maps, but in the deep delves it's just crazy.

The vast majority of PoE players play solo and will never party. Buffing aurabots will not help promote party play. It will only increase the disparity between those who can party and those who can't.

What exactly do you want to achieve by trivializing the game for a small minority of players? They get bored faster and quit. This is a dead end. Rethink it.

3. Irrelevant bosses

The bosses are meant to be much harder than trash, but also much more rewarding. But that second part is lost. There is no reward for the risk. There is no reason to kill any map boss in T1-15 more than once per league (for the Atlas bonus). A boss gives less xp and drops less loot than a couple of packs of trash. It 'can' drop higher tier maps, but it almost never does. It's not even needed to spread the Shaper/Elder influence. Why should anybody risk dying to kill map bosses? They have become completely irrelevant.

Make Bosses Great Again! Make killing the boss worth literally half of the map's total xp value (i.e. the boss gives as much xp as all trash combined). Make the boss drop as many maps as the rest of the population. Make the bosses drop better currency, rare cards, uniques. Bring back the reasons to kill the bosses.

4. Burial Chambers

It was amusing at first. 'Oh look, this is where they moved the Doctor to!'. But after several leagues of this, I have to ask: did you do it on purpose? T3 is entirely too convenient, the Atlas can be easily shaped to provide an unlimited (and ever growing) supply of this map. Meaning that the most powerful item in the game can be obtained without killing anything even remotely challenging. It completely defies any notion of risk vs reward.

But why? What's the point? Is this just a trap for compulsive farmers? It sure keeps a lot of people occupied for weeks and months every league. But instead of enjoying new content and league mechanics those poor souls spend all of their time trapped in that cursed place.

IMO the most powerful items should be obtained from the most challenging content.

5. Item quantity

Quantity is a cancer. You've already listed all the reasons why it's bad when you removed the Item Quantity gem from the game. Those reasons are still valid. And yet you are helping this cancer grow back by adding new ways to increase quantity.

Half measures such as map drops not being affected by item quantity can't stop the disease. Maps are not the top commodity anymore, they can be bought with other drops.

Rework the quantity. Make the map IIQ the only factor. Convert the quantity from gear to something else (rarity, whatever). Fuck Bisco's.

6. Invulnerable enemies

It started as boss phases that weren't really bad, or even helpful (e.g Atziri). It was kept under control for a long time (e.g. Phylacterial Link was dismissed).

But starting from 3.0 somebody has been designing really annoying bosses with 'dodge or die' invulnerable phases. Shakari, Garukhan, Vilenta, Eradicator, Uber Elder... And then they started adding invulnerable trash too. Abyss, Incursion, and now Delve.

Who the hell keeps designing this shit? STOP IT! It's making the game significantly less enjoyable. Everybody hates it. If you hold a poll for the worst boss in PoE, I guarantee you that it will be a contest between Eradicator, Shakari and Vilenta. If there is just 1 designer who is a fan of these mechanics - consider firing him. And redesign or remove all that crap.

7. Game breaking mechanics

The Delve league with its pseudo-infinite monster damage scaling exposed the worst, most ridiculous game breaking mechanics that have been around for quite a while but were ignored because GGG didn't think they had enough impact. What about now? Do you still consider these things just harmless memes that are too impractical to use? Or is it time to patch these gaping holes in the game design?

- Permanent 100% resistance to all damage (as long as there is no penetration). God Mode. IDDQD. Damage is meaningless. Challenge is non-existent. 'Your progress is only limited by' ...your ability to farm sulphite.

This has happened a few times in the past, and every time you chose to treat the symptoms instead of the cause, by nerfing various items (mostly flasks). And then creating new ways to achieve the same result easier than before.

Most of the important stats are hard capped at 95% - with the glaring exception of elemental resistance. It's an obvious design flaw. And it's really easy to fix. I'll be shocked if this loophole remains open when Delve gets added to the core game.

- Spending life to gain a lot more life (Zerphi + MoM + Blood Magic). Unlimited healing power. Any damage that doesn't 1-shot you can be ignored.

This is just broken. It was supposed to convert mana into life, not life into much more life. I don't know how it has been allowed to work for so long, especially after Vaal Pact got nerfed.

Overall

Fixing even some of these issues would be very healthy for the game.

Great Feedback. :)

Gotta agree with almost everything.

"

But why? What's the point? It this just a trap for compulsive farmers? It sure keeps a lot of people occupied for weeks and months every league. But instead of enjoying new content and league mechanics those poor souls spend all of their time trapped in that cursed place.

players playing longer is exactly the reason

with a commodity that is cheap to use (hosting costs are very low per user) yet brings $$ it is the best way to earn more. make people play longer. they do not have to enjoy it - addiction works just as well

this is the main profit scaling method of game-as-a-service business model. the longer they play the more they spend

if you play long you pretty much HAVE to spend on tabs. i expect whiteknigts to bring Alia here but one player with one goal does not make 4tab gameplay any less shity compared to what you get with 15 (including currency and map tabs that are pretty much mandatory for sanity)
after you spent on tabs you can spend more on tabs or maybe buy some nice mtx. to be fair - most uniques with 3d art look better than Power Rangers cosplay mtx and 'skin transfer' is much better option here

all the boring tedious sh.. added to the game serves one purpose - to tax you. tax you for your time. so you can play 'the game' only after you serve your time: doing boring masters, farming sulphite, picking up nets, farming quarry. you know. doing these '20sec here and there' pointless actions. 10s of times per hour.

all this time tax chunks add up

Not going to write a wall of text here but I don't agree with half of the positives and agree with everything negative and the negatives you have pointed out are just the surface. The worst part is GGG flat out lying & being extremely lazy - delaying making fossils stackable to get more stash tab sales, sulphite troll, "Your progress is only limited by the power of your character build." etc. Just like in real life, when people lie or try to deceive you, you lose trust towards them. Regarding balance I won't be playing til there is some difficulty increase at least somewhere on maps which I won't be expecting.
It will take 1 more league until rest of the players catch up and realize that, until then I'll just keep getting those "wow ur just burnt out" messages.

And you didn't even mention full phys -> ele damage shift (although it's technically required for flask immunity), Gluttony of Elements, 1 HP darkness farming and 4% visibility builds in general.

I also don't agree with every single detail, but making arguments against it at this point would weaken the arguments for the most part with which I do agree. If everything is "fixed" according to this, I'll be happier afterwards.

Biggest problem in PoE is that fact than balance are building around economy, where people mostly plays solo.


Low spawn chanses for bosses. You must to spend hundreds of hours to have 1 chance to fight with some of them. It's just ridiculous. But... almost all of the time you just can buy access to this boss from another players. And this way is much more easier in terms of time that you may to spend.

And this is only one example. Game have a lot of them.

But thing that harm more is the fact that you have no progression control dirrectly in your hands. Most of the game aspects builded around RNG. You can't feel progress in situation where you did same actions hundred of times, but get positive result only once. Not because you did something right this time, but because RNG blessed you. And every new league is going more crazy. Double RNG wall... triple RNG wall... is like a slot machine where only action you can do is pull the lever and HOPE.

RNG is good in some situations.
RNG as core of game design - most fucking shit ever.

And 'balance'... I think right now balance just does not exist. Invulnerability phases to limit players power is the most innocent of implemented features since 3.0 was released.

Good feedback and I agree with it. I just feel like you're a little more burnt out than I am (no wonder with 40 achievements).

I love delving, but I play the game a lot less than up to 2 months ago, because the grind to try and beat the lousy RNG is just annoying at this point. Boss drops suck too much to build my char around them and work to get better at them and killing trash is not much fun. This is a dangerous path for a game.

+100 to the hate on invulnerable monster phases and their cheap first-shot mechanics!

+999
a double-process league, double mindless farming, as hard as 1hp build. Why don't they nerf the 1hp build in a hotfix? I'll call it bullying, since Incursion.

Solid feedback. Agree with most of it.