Anyone playing Ruthless - opinions so far?

I think the most they should give us in terms of "fixing resists" is the harvest craft to change from 1 type to another. That way we're not crafting additional power onto an item.

i did the alpha. its not as crazy as it sounds. its probably makes for a much more compelling experience for people who softcore trade interactions

SSF Ruthless does not feel fun to me but was an interesting experience.

I just quit after level 45. Ruthless is not for me. I like the slower pace but it just feels too restrictive. So little currency/crafting materials dropped i wonder if the loot filter was broken, the lack of crafting bench was bad enough, i could even roll suffixes on things i threw a trans on, i had very few jewellers too, four to precise not that I need many sockets.

With no supports you have to rely on rotating skills but the lack of dps made combat slow and unengaging. The lack of movement speed compounded this feeling.

It was fine playing through Acts 1 and 2 without gear but Act 5 was no fun. I quit knowing it would just be more of the same for the rest of the campaign and maps. Those playing with fire trap or a cold DoT build will have a better time but trying something else seems it would be more frustrating than rewarding.

I'll just play SSF without the Ruthless.

I really liked the campaign. Very nostalgic (I was there when docks farming was a thing).

I like the lack of supports and aura gems. Also very nostalgic (remember when multistrike was a reward at the end of the 3rd difficulty?). Combined with the lack of good gear, you never run out of possible upgrades, you're working on so many of them, it feels like some progress can always be made.

I also like the reduced speed. I'm more boomer than zoomer, so I'm happy I don't feel the need to be faster (because I can't).

The one thing I don't like is endgame. The atlas tree / mapping experience needs some touches.

It's brutal to sustain maps until it isn't. Then it's brutal again, until it isn't. Etc.
In the current system, you have to suffer through so many dry streaks until you finally establish yourself in a new map tier, and while this sounds "ruthless", it's really not. It's just boring, because the content you play quickly becomes too easy, even with horrible gear and missing gems. This is also nostalgic, but this time, in a bad way.

Also the way they did the atlas leads to very one-sided trees. You need to take everything that gives you maps, plus Nico and Alva (because maps). Otherwise you never sustain. Also, the other atlas passives just don't help at all, because the spawn rates are so low that even if you spec fully into harvest or whatever, you just never see it.

I would propose to artifically increase white map drops, just so you can actually play the endgame without immediately suffering, and don't feel bad to 3:1 your white maps to somehow get into yellows.
Never should a player have to go back to acts to farm tier 1 maps.

For higher tier maps, the system kind of works. It's still brutal, but the atlas tree starts to do some work once you allocated like 50+ points.

Peterlerock, thank you for the great post. Your suggestions are the best I've seen that would seem to address this issue. I'm just near to finishing up act 7 with a level 61 character. I'm guessing that I'll likely either start a new Ruthless character after finishing the storyline or just playing in standard. I hope that GGG fixes this because I am having fun fooling around with Ruthless. It would be nice to play some endgame in Ruthless as well, at least in the future.

Peterlerock got a point there

The campaign and early mapping was challenging and exciting

Now despite specing into all the map atlas nodes maps sustain is bad. I'm mostly doing T3-T6

Alchs are super rare so you can't juice maps and the blue maps I ran are empty, boring and unrewarding, just an endless grind

I speced initially into heist and did quite a few runs but it drops nothing but blues - a complete waste of time

Got a few gems out of ritual so that stays for now

I might end up leveling a summoner as I have good gear and gems for it but I doubt it's gonna do as well as RF JUGGS

I have been playing Ruthless on my level 73 Guardian (Summoner, Aboslution+Skellies).

I haven't touched the game since a long time, my first level 70 was in 2014.
I partly followed a build then did my own spin to what I got so far from ruthless, it's far from perfect.

I introduced one of my girlfriends to the game by making her a Ruthless character, only experience she had was Lost Ark, and I never played Ruthless before (sorry i'm unaware since Ruthless was launched). She liked the game a lot, we played through all the storyline, in about the same speed I would do in the normal campaign without movement speed gems. I found myself 30% movement speed boots, and I boosted her with my Guardian ability.

We played the full game in a SSF way (but didn't join SSF), with the 2 of us, dealing with the 50%+ increased HP all the time. and only got 17% drop rate increase and nothing else. at the end I carried most of the bosses, since we couldn't find her the proper gems, just yet.

Also I avoided the league mechanic like the plague, since making her avoid abilities, was literally impossible.

Everything else, feels way more rewarding in Ruthless and I personally got more satisfactory from it, knowing that I am not missing out on some of the currencies path of exile has added later to their game. But knowing that if I would join a guild the game would feel a lot better to my opinion.

We pretty much stopped playing Ruthless now, since I missed buying gems in the acts.
But still, this game mode feels already a lot more rewarding and challenging.

Then we made a new character in the normal version (sanctum) and it felt like I was joining in on "Power Leveling service", everything felt like playing a theme park game. you get everything too often, and nothing is impossible in your imagination you have all the power to make the changes. If not by currency then the rare drops that are potentially x amount of exalts worth. also the currency value in Ruthless is different. I would say in certain cases at the start a Alchemy is worth more then anything else.

I decided to show her normal version of the game for now, because now she was able to play with me and be kind on par with each other, which is more fun for the both of us. I would definitely give Ruthless another try, in another league, and if they would add gems to the acts. and that's it, then Ruthless would be my choice of playing.

I think it's funny that (most) that ruthless is doing is shifting everything where things are just more fun.

Yes, you have more of everything in regular PoE. And all you use that “more” for is for making loot pointless and mind-numbingly boring currency grinding.

I'm repeating myself, but I can't get over how much better ruthless is.

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mccready написал:

I think it's funny that (most) that ruthless is doing is shifting everything where things are just more fun.

"Shifting" for sure, "more fun" is highly subjective.

You have to fight/hope/grind for stuff that you get for free in normal PoE or work a little for in SSF.

This makes "normal loot" rewarding, but also makes it impossible to access great loot (I will never 6L a unique chestpiece, I will never have a double-influenced item etc).

I enjoy it, but I'm sure I'm in a minority here.