Design flaws around the temple and potential solutions

Problem 1: Temple setup is slow, punishing and frustrating.

As of now, we can place room only after running six maps, which can take a long time for players who aren’t super efficient. This means that if a room was not placed well, the consequence is huge. This was time and effort wasted because the temple (the WHOLE mechanic of 0.4) will be unrewarding. Not only that, it makes it that learning the actual room combos take ages, which means people will rely on external resources rather than learning by themselves. Finally, seeing your whole setup being destroyed just doesn’t feel good.

Solution: From maps on, when purifying the circle in EACH maps, the temple console pops up from the circle and allow us to place 3 tiles (6 after we get the medallion). The player can choose to interact with the temple anytime, either doing it often with few rooms or setting up a whole temple and running it all at once. Also, path tiles can be rotated. Also, placing the room does not lock it in this spot. The game would allow you to place all your available tiles and mix/match the location to find combos with what you have, AND THEN ask you to confirm your placement. This way, players can experiment and learn combos by themselves. Whenever you decide to run your temple, it will be entirely destroyed at the end of your run. People can choose to setup a huge temple and fight Atziri everytime (but it will take maybe 20 maps to get there), or run small temples as soon as they have a T3 room of their liking (quicker, but fewer rewards). This will keep the mechanic running while not feeling as bad a seeing random connections destroyed DURING the process of making the temple.


Problem 2: Temple is unrewarding

The temple feels great in the campaign. In endgame, besides T3 rooms and boss rewards, there is nothing interesting and the opportunity cost (in time) is huge. Getting a regal/exalt altar in maps is laughable when we have hundreds of them in our stash. Same for artificer orbs.

Solution: from T1 maps, the regal and exalt altar provide the effect of a greater regal / exalt. From T15 maps, these altar provide the benefit of a perfect regal / exalt. This depends on the tier of the map you were on when placing the room tile in the map. Also, all T2 rewards should be upgraded so that rooms are not entirely useless to run while not T3. I suggest a special chest similar to the troves from Abyss, that will be present by default in every T2 rooms. These may have special rewards only found in the temple. For example, the “arsenal vaal troves” could have a small chance to drop implicit corrupted unique weapons, and an even smaller chance to drop a double implicit corrupted weapon. Same for “armour vall troves”, but for armours. T3 should remain the same in my opinion, but I haven’t played around enough to judge.


Problem 3: Monsters in the Temple are just blockers and frustrating time loss.

We are playing an ARPG. We should be looking for killing more mobs, but somehow the mobs in the Temple are just frustrating to encounter because they are just blockers and time wasters.

Solution: Rooms that modify their effectiveness / packsize / etc… don’t have a room reward attached to them, but also give an upside similar to map mods. If someone doesn’t care about the room rewards and want to maximize their profit from mobs, they could focus their temple setup to make giga juiced enemies that will be rewarding at the cost of being dangerous. Other players could have a balanced setup with decently rewarding enemies and some juicy reward rooms. Some people would just care about the room rewards and have many of them, but enemies would barely drop anything, but that would come from a choice from the player.

Regarding Probnlem 2:
I entered the temple a couple of times and there was nothing worth my time in it.
The drops are just terrible, the crafting benches need a rework to adapt to the level of the player, the whole mechanic is clunky from the construction puzzle up to the endless hallways without any sense to interconnections between rooms.

All of this is unintuitive and clunky, i loled hard when i found out they even made the level of the rooms dependend on certain other rooms while not displaying this in an self-explaining, helpful way inside the game like games do in 2025.

Oh, and of course there are too few checkpoints, but this is an all-over-poe2 issue, but here in this maze it sucks soo hard, it's just terrible.

I have the strong feeling everything GGG is focussed about is stretch playtime to fill the metrics and totally forgetting about fun. This mechanic is no fun, it's not worth the time, i don't interact with it.

I don't think there's any ill intent on GGG's side, my theory is that they test mechanic by playing it over and over on a test server, and this way it probably doesn't feel bad, because they just place rooms over and over without the thought process it will take the players hours to get to this point.

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Bowspin#2454 написал:

I don't think there's any ill intent on GGG's side, my theory is that they test mechanic by playing it over and over on a test server, and this way it probably doesn't feel bad, because they just place rooms over and over without the thought process it will take the players hours to get to this point.

It's simpler than that actually, it's Early Access so we are their QA.