end game mapping with the bear shaman

TLDR: bear good except for rampage, maps bad, league mechanic bad

as much as i want to enjoy the sprawling atlas, i just can't in it's current form...

thank you for fixing one of the two big problems which was your juice going on random maps you had no intention of going to, and now it's juicing per map. thanks for that

the other big problem is the forcing of playing shit tier maps, which sadly is the vast majority of maps.

every map feels like it's just narrow corridor mazes that force lots of back tracking and makes mechanics feel like shit. i get frustrated having to backtrack all the time, and even more frustrated when i can't really play a mechanic properly due to map layout... like breach for example opens up to a big circle, but jokes on you because you can't get to half of it without backtracking the entire map due to the maze like structure of maps, and even then you can only do a portion of the half because of the narrow corridor structure of like all the maps... narrow corridor mazes are just straight up bad... not every map has to be one big open area by any means and this problem magically goes away if we were able to select what maps we want to run... give players agency please.

like poe1, i do for example, cells map once to get atlas passives and will never go back again. Once for a progression point i think is fine. so cells map can exist, and maybe some masochist wants to just run cells maps, but the majority of people do not, so we just CHOOSE to not run it and run other stuff... the sprawling atlas in it's current form forces you play shit maps constantly which gets the player frustrated, and more likely to stop playing. in fact that's what prompted me to alt tab now from the game. you want players to want to map, not feel like it's a frustrating, exhausting chore.

the atlas passive progression system does feel quite underwhelming as well... i suspect this will be iterated upon in the coming patches


also, we don't need a bajillion doors, get rid of them already... i know you learned this from poe1 heist days... the only door on any map should be the entry to the boss, with rare exceptions to be made, like vaults of kamsa, the couple of doors there i think is fine

additionally, the narrow corridors and lots of obstructions makes pathing feel bad and you get stuck or hung up easily, especially during rampage


next is mobs, and more specifically body blocking during rampage. i feel like i should have no body blocking at all during this attack and it should trample over everything, not get body blocked constantly, paths you terribly or just straight up stops your guy from moving or cancels the attack... like what?

as title suggests, i've pretty much just done bear, but it feels great tbh... you guys did a lot of good work with this. transformations feel good, attacks feel good for the most part... as far as bear is concerned, only real complaint thusfar is rampage feels like shit due to pathing and body blocking

oh, and league mechanic is kinda bad... it's unintuitive and time consuming and forcing to go into the temple all the time is bad. on any give tileset you're going to need what, like 10 pathing pieces to get to the boss, yet every 6 maps i only get 1-2 pathing pieces. so essentially you're saying to the player if you want to get to the boss, you must stop mapping, enter this side area, place one or two pieces, enter temple, leave temple, leave side area, do 6 maps, repeat 5x times.... i say this because there isn't any reason to do any of the rooms really.. an exalt bench? random weapon armory 'chests'? who cares... if the mapping encounter dropped a frag, then every say 20-30 frags you got a fully revealed and placed temple with t3 rooms, juicy rewards and a guaranteed atziri fight, it'd be better. You could even just forget about the temple and have it be similar to breach where you clear an area leading to the boss. Then i could do w/e 100 maps, never be interrupted going into this side area, collect my frags as i map, then do all my bossing in one session... you know, kind of like how the other mechanics work... i do breach, save splinters, do bossing at some point; simulacrum as well. Abyss doesn't have splinters, but when we do get underground areas, i know if there is a boss or not before going down, not to mention the highly desirable rewards of omens and desecrate currency... current league mechanic has nothing really desirable except atziri fight so it just feels like shit; not to mention it's another maze like structure, except you said to the players, guess what, you can build your own shit tier map layouts with our league mechanic. Also, we put doors in here all over the place and you can play hide and seek with the mobs to open the doors. just feelsbadman...

correction on the 1-2 pathing pieces per 6 maps, it's actually 0-2.

just did 6 encounters in maps, no pathing pieces progressed towards boss; of course in order to get 6 new pieces i have run temple, leave temple, leave side area and do 6 more maps...