Improvements to Towers

I dont remember which content creator said it, but it got me thinking. Towers incentivize you to stay in one area, farming the stacked triple tower coverage.

This concentrated farming zone goes against the idea of constant exploration of the Atlas (which the devs has said is the point of a never ending Atlas). It stops you from finding Citadels, which means you cant fight the end-game boss often (unless you're buying the Fragments). This is the opposite of POE 1. In POE 1 whats great, is that no matter what you are doing while mapping, the strategy or the map itself, you accumulate end game boss invitations just by mapping.

Essentially, we are missing a way to accumulate Arbiter Fragments just by mapping efficiently (layering towers and focusing on the overlapped zones).

Instead, of having Towers create concentrated zones, a possible improvement would be to have the Towers apply their benefits to the next X maps you run. If you find 2 towers, the second tower would overlap its effect but only for the remaining maps from the first tower, so you could have overlap of effects, but not for all the maps you are going to run, just like the zones have to overlap, and where they dont overlap you only get one tower effect.

This would mean you could chase the Citadels without penalty to effective map farming, which is currently the case, if you want to just chase Citadels you are penalized for it because you are not effectively mapping.

Thoughts?

(If this has been suggested before, I've never seen it - mods feel free to delete if it has.)

I like the concept. Probably would need additional restrictions to prevent some more degenerate stuff like queueing up 20 towers in a row and then running them all. But something absolutely needs to change with towers, I too would rather "go next" than sit there trying to figure out the least awful, least wasteful path through overlaps. And having to run tons of nonjuiced, nonrewarding, crap maps so that you can earn brief moments of being allowed to play juiced maps - is terrible. It's good to see different suggestions. I hope they try lots of experiments while we're in EA and move towards something much more engaging.

I like it too because it would help stop me hoarding my best waystones for my best atlas nodes. Which i know probably sounds good but it became a hassle keeping track of nodes and determining what was 'good enough' to be paired together. I spend way too much time deciding what to run because a bad combination means a boring/uneventful/less rewarding next few minutes.

Dont have that feeling in poe1 because its only the map(waystone) that has rng mods on it and not the node + waystone. I think the extra RNG makes it more diffult to create the kind of maps i want to be running.

(only fought arbiter 1-2 times in 0.2 because i couldnt be bothered searching for citadels over finding overlapping towers.)

It would definitely mean needing to balance towers again to avoid the problems of running 20 towers in a row (as you said), and also will probably mean that each tower affects less maps than now (full juiced tower can affect 30+ maps).

Maybe make it so you cant run more than X towers in a row after that they get overwritten?

I really think it would make mapping more enjoyable because youd spend less time just LOOKING where to go (finding the triple stack) and actually playing the game because as soon as you find ONE tower you know your next maps will be juiced to your liking.

Id be ok with a little less juice from Towers, for more on maps if that meant actually mapping more and less planning. These towers are better than 0.1, but need more cooking.

Right now its getting to the triple, setting up the triple, making sure not to do maps that will be in the center of the overlap while setting it up. Its so tedious.

How about we really stop with the concept of random buff maps?

Like... It really unmotivated me if I need to do some "filler" maps

I want my maps to be meaningfull at most, not pick some 4-5 useless to reach a 6th good.

The way I saw this "fix" working would be that as soon as you get your first "quest" tablet you would get a "quest" tower, that would give you X number of maps, and from there you hunt towers and Citadels.

The idea is to stop having dead maps because you always (hopefully) have at least one tower active giving you content to X maps. This would mean you would have to find a tower in X maps before going back to dead maps.

It would make the constant exploring fun imo, you are chasing 2 things, Citadels and towers but you are constantly going forward (which ever direction you are going in) vs going around in circles completing a zone that has no benefit because the moment you leave the zone, more dead content and its the chase for next best zone otherwise "wasting" best tablets etc.