Endgame Feedback for .2
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Preface: All of this is my opinion and anecdotally sourced. Your experience may be different. That's cool. I am aware it's an early access period. I am also aware that GGG is treating it as a live launch as they said. There are a great many things about this game that I like, but as GGG has said, the negative feedback is often more useful.
Context: Two level 93 characters in endgame. Both playing Lightning Spear. Fully endgame geared. Not sure on the hard number but I assume 500 maps completed. Endgame bosses completed. Feedback: I think endgame is fundamentally flawed. I believe the current atlas is poorly designed and needs significant reworking. Endgame bosses are at best irrelevant and more likely just a complete waste of time. Map "juicing" is completely broken and provides no inherent value (or nominal value over non "juice" mapping) compared to other paths of gear progression for trade league - crafting/flipping. Further, each of the atlas passives that you are able to specialize in are quite bad and unrewarding. If I describe something as "bad", "not good", or really just any negative combination I'm referring to it as primarily a value proposition. Different people find different things "fun" and therefore I'll leave that out of my discussion entirely. However, I can speak directly to the value proposition of the intersection of time/effort/reward to many of the systems in the game currently. That will be the focus of this feedback. 1) Atlas: The endgame atlas remains tedious and maps are simply too long. Towers need to be reworked or eliminated. Base loot is much too low. 1a) Problem:
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Currently, as there is extremely limited player agency on playing optimal maps, mapping is wildly unrewarding. Forcing players to complete bad map layouts in order to optimize towers is fine if two things are true: maps are commensurately more rewarding given the level of input effort and there is a viable progression path for either character power or efficiency (usually both). Maps themselves are much too long given player speed and lack of density. Base loot being so scarce makes the travel maps even more unrewarding. It also makes atlas progression very unrewarding. It makes atlas progression itself feel pointless as you aren't gaining rewards by progressing your atlas (this will be discussed further in the "juicing" section).
1b) Solution:
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Rework towers to give atlas visibility only. Remove tablets completely or have them simply function as scarabs do in POE1. Player speed needs to increase by 30-40% base in order to keep the current map size. If not, maps need a 30-40% reduction in size. Base loot needs to be increased somewhat but please DO NOT GIVE US POE1 LOOT! No one wants 1,000,000 items/map. The vast majority simply want loot 2.0. Improve the quality of loot drops drastically as the game difficulty scales in maps. However, as the majority of players don't optimize towers for hyper efficient farming, base loot must increase so that "alch and go" players feel mapping is rewarding. I would suggest specifically a 20% increase in base quantity, and a 500% increase in loot "quality" (I am not using the term "rarity" here because simply getting more yellow loot would just add to the tedium of identifying items - the 99.99% of which are completely worthless).
2) Atlas Points: Atlas points provide too little improvement in rewards compared to simply leaving the points out. This could simply be a loot issue but it needs to be stressed that these points need to feel like they have direct, tangible value. I can't put a number on it, but my testing leads me to believe that a fully 40/40 Atlas Passive Tree at best feels like 20% more loot? 2a) Problem:
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Atlas points themselves have such little value numerically that it's impossible to tell if they do anything. This shouldn't be the case. 3% packsize is an impossibly small value for a player to notice. These passives need to be much more meaningful. All of the mechanic specialization points on the base atlas tree feel wholly unrewarding. The boss killing points (Delirium, Breach, Ritual, Expedition) vary wildly in effectiveness.
2b) Solution:
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For the most part, increasing values here would be fairly impactful. 10% packsize/node for instance would scale well and be readily noticeable. Specific mechanics need a complete rework however. For instance, Wisps are tedious, unrewarding, and poorly designed. Needing to first find a wisp on an enormous maze of a map with deadends is obviously terrible. It would be the simplest thought exercise to realize why players wouldn't want to do this. Second, if you find that wisp tucked away in the corner, it's entirely possible you've already cleared all the rares rendering that wisp worthless - literally. And third, perhaps bugged, is just how little value they have. To solve this mechanically, hybridize the functionality and have them either spawn on map open and allow them to affect x number of mobs for normal/magic/rare/unique or have them spawn at the start and allow us to pick them up (like ghosts) and then x number of mobs killed have their affect. Many of the nodes are like this in that they need numerical balancing but do have mechanical issues as well. These need to be addressed.
3) Map Juicing: Map juicing is in an incredibly bad state. There used to be, or at least appear to be, an accepted level of deltas between the methods of gear progression in endgame. Crafting/flipping/mapping (usually in that order from most profitable to least) would yield a degree of currency that would allow you to progress in a fairly equitable rate. That is no longer the case and the reason is that when you get to a point where your gear is "capped" and you need more currency to progress beyond that "cap" you are at a significant disadvantage compared to crafting/flipping. Maps simply do not scale rewards at a level commensurate with the other progression tracks. 3a) Problem:
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If player progression is no longer rewarding enough to overcome the various tiers of "gear", progression either feels too unrewarding or pointless. Your character upgrades are a massive time investment for a minuscule power upgrade. Map juicing needs to be competitive in terms of currency generation/hour with crafting and flipping. Currently, that would be an almost 20x multiplier comparing my data.
3b) Solution:
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Tying towers functionally to juice needs to be removed. It ends up causing long stretches of poor value maps (no juice travel maps) and bad zones with either one or two tower overlaps. This feels bad and also obviously affects currency/hour. The scarab system in POE1 is simply superior and tablets should function similarly. IF towers cannot be removed (and I would remove their function entirely) then the maximum number of towers in the radius of maps needs to be 1, and they need to have 6 slots for all the mechanics or however many the max is, and the values on tablets need to dramatically increase so a 6 tablet tower feels like it's making your maps very difficult and very rewarding.
4) Bossing: Boss drops are underwhelming. There is a significant time investment or currency investment in order to do bosses let alone farm them and for that that investment, the quality of drops need to improve. The fights themselves need an overhaul as they deal too much damage across the board for the level of defense provided in the game. 4a) Problem:
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Bosses take too long to get to and drop very poor loot. This isn't necessarily an easily fixable problem but there are things that could be done to at least smooth out the bad luck streaks so that running the bosses feels rewarding. The boss encounters and mechanics need to be tuned in such a way that makes the fights feel more "epic" rather than a situation in which it's always an arms race of "would I rather do the mechanics or simply one shot this boss?" The damage values for various abilities is too high.
4b) Solution:
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Tune unique drops on bosses up. Make even the common ones useful and perhaps buff the rarest ones further. Bringing the loot value floor up would go a long way from giving the bosses staying power throughout the league. Reduce incoming damage in the encounters and make the fights more about managing resources (flasks, regen, etc.) while still outputting reasonable damage. Fewer one shots from the bosses and players is an obvious design goal but I think this current iteration falls much to short of that goal.
Last bumped23 апр. 2025 г., 13:41:14
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