New Atlas System Feedback

PoE is my favorite game of all time, and it's become an important part of my life. This feedback is really important to me and I'm having a hard time articulating it, so my apologies if it's overly negative or unfair.

PoE2 EA has greatly exceeded my expectations. I am thrilled with every aspect of the game except for one very important system: The Atlas. I'm worried that everything great about PoE2 is going to end up overshadowed by the flaws of the new atlas.

The new atlas looks amazing and has many interesting features, but in practice it's honestly the most disappointing system I could imagine. I have 0 desire to grind maps despite a huge patch dropping today.

It's a question of context switching. The sheer number of different menial tasks required to optimally path through the atlas is exhausting. The worst part is that these tasks cannot be effectively broken up and done in stages like they could in PoE 1. In PoE 1 I can spend 10-15 minutes preparing for a session and then do 2 hours of juiced maps.

In PoE 2 on the other hand, juicing maps is an ordeal of constantly switching focus between:

-evaluating nodes based on layouts
-evaluating nodes based on distance to nearby towers
-evaluating nodes based connections to other nodes and towers
-maintaining a stash of premium rolled waystones
-maintaining a stash of filler waystones to use in filler nodes
-keeping a stash of tablets to juice my towers
-dealing with the clunky UI for using delirium oils on maps
-dealing with greatly increased pressure on my inventory space due to the fact that PoE 2 puts much more importance on picking up grey item bases.

All that effort just to get a small area of juiced nodes which takes me 30 minutes to clear.

The amount of organization and bookkeeping required to set up a "juiced map session" is just not sustainable. I'm literally done with the game so much sooner than I thought I would be and that's really sad to me. I don't know what else to say.

I'm not sure what actionable feedback to give you except that I want the PoE 1 atlas back.

Agree.

I'm not even a POE1 player and I'm only level 79 in Tier 8 maps, don't even have the currency to fully juice most things, and play very casually so I'm not even that worried about optimizing every possible gain, and I'm already a little tired of this system.

The endgame has too much micro-management, and zero systems to help with that micro-management.

I don't even think a waystone tab would help. If anything it would mess with the micro even more, since we have to manually keep track of the good waystones and the bad waystones.

Then we have to remember which nodes we are trying to pass through for the set-up, over multiple sessions, since most people aren't playing this game 80 hours a week, and for most people, the game isn't going to be on our minds 24/7, we're bound to forget things and make "mistakes", and there's no system in the game to help with that.

Sure we can make memos and take screenshots for annotating, but seriously...?

I can understand the need to provide "depth" to the endgame, and hence we have the possibility of setting up really juiced up regions and running them with really juiced up waystones.

But it is just too tedius for casual and chilled night of gaming.

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To alleviate the problem, I think the most boring and tedius part of this endgame should be overhauled: the set-up phase, i.e. pathing through garbage nodes using garbage waystones to all the Lost Towers just to slot in tablets.

This set-up phase is boring and unrewarding, while requiring a lot of micro-management. It is also the reason why we will need to manually organize and store our waystones.

But I can understand how devs don't want everything to be rewarding in the endgame, to pad playtime. So to at least alleviate some of the tedium, I propose a revamp of the atlas map UI:

Let us slot in waystones before reaching the node.

This way, whenever I get a bad waystone, I can pre-dump it on a bad node I know I want to path through just to get to the towers. And I can pre-dump a waystone in the towers.

This means we could spend say 20 minutes just inserting waystones into an already visible area, in a sense laying down a "roadmap" for us to follow later. Then for the next couple of sessions of gameplay, just click on nodes we want to play and get right in to the gameplay.

We are still doing essentially the same thing, following the same rules, just in a different order and clumping together the micro-management part of the endgame in batches.

This avoids the problem pointed out by the op, where we have to constantly switch contexts.

Wow @kumogakure#7381 that is legitimately a fantastic solution to this problem.

Please add this feature, GGG.