Season 14 (Soulthirst) Retrospective

Due to a lot of (imo) good changes, i was excited about a (this) race season for the first time in a very long time. In the end, i was not disappointed.


The Good

* Points regardless of death: great change. Everyone can play more aggressively and push the limits without fear. Frustration is reduced, dying and losing everything was always a bit (or a lot) annoying, no matter how competitive you are.

* Balancing point levels based on weakest class. I liked this because it allowed me to focus on Ranger for the whole season, while still being able to achieve my target of 1,000 points. I'm not sure how the change felt to better classes though, it might have been a bit bland to never really have a levelling target other than "as high as possible".

* Schedule. Maybe it's because my life outside the game has changed and i now follow a regular schedule, but the schedule worked very well for me. Being able to keep things organized and a routine was great. West coast America timezone was great, maybe even perfect.

1) Morning meeting/breakfast
2) 10/11am race
3) Lunch
4) 2/3pm race (if any)
5) Supper
6) 8/9/10 and/or 11pm race
7) Sleep
8) Skip 2am & 6am races
9) Repeat

* Headhunter. This race was quite fun, and imo is what the Signature should have been. My only complaint is Volatile, which forces you to bootstrat with a resistance buffing rare. If you don't get one, that sucks. The race encourages mass mayhem and facerolling, but Volatile is pulling in the opposite direction, forcing you to check every rare sometimes, which is jarring and annoying.

* 24 hour BLAMT. Personally i loved this, but it's no surprise because i'm an advocate for long (also, difficult) races, which sadly nowadays are extremely few and far between. I realize longer races aren't nearly as popular, such is life. I don't have a problem with the point structure nor how it affected the season.

* Descent revamp. Two thumbs up here. Nothing to complain about, mainly because i'm not top tier so i never have the issue of running out of content. Even then i think good players can simply start full clearing earlier, so the race rewards skilled play no matter how you look at it. Obviously density rng will have an effect, and until they implement fixed seed monster density, that complaint will affect Descent more than other races.


The Ambivalent

* Endless Ledge ramp up. TBH this probably needs a bit of work, as going from the zone 2 joke difficulty to zone 3 act 4 mobs or w/e is happening is jarring. I think the transition could be smoothed out still more.


The Bad

* Soulthirst signature race mod. I'm not good enough to have seen the full benefit of this mod, so my opinion may be invalid. For me though, the mod was extremely bland, possibly the most bland mod that has ever been used in a race. The idea may have seemed good in theory but in practice, it's like it wasn't even there.

Why not simply Soul Eater on Kill? There's nothing wrong with making the Signature race something that wildly changes gameplay. In fact it should be encouraged, to keep the best players on their toes and having to adapt to something very different.



Looking forward to see if GGG can keep me interested enough for 2x 1k point seasons in a row for the first time!

This was a great race season.

What I liked

Keeping points on death made racing far less frustrating to play and I had a lot of fun.

Balancing points based on the weakest class did make it easier for less experienced racers like me to get the top point brackets with the stronger classes, so it did seem easier to get points this season which is not a bad thing.

Headhunter was by far my favorite race type and the most fun I have had in PoE since the 3 day Exiles Everywhere event. The only complaint I would have about that race type is how easy it is to die to volatile mobs at the start. That race would be perfect if they did not spawn until a little further in (Act 2?).

I did not play the 24 hour BLAMT cause I don't really enjoy BLAMT playing alone, but that's just me. Many others seemed to enjoy that race.

Descent is a lot better than it used to be with the chest and zone level revamp but it is still really easy to die at the very beginning. This has turned a few of my friends away from this race type. I would remove the Carrion Queens and the Voidbearers from the first and second zones respectively just so people don't die to mobs they can't reasonably kill at low levels.

What I did not like

The Signature race was really bad. The mod was even less noticeable than Bloodgrip, which at least did something to Hillock. Soulthirst was useless. Rare mobs are not worth killing 9 times out of 10 and the Soul Eater provided did not last long enough for it to make a difference. This race would have been so much more fun if players just had Soul Eater up all the time and had the soul count reset upon changing zones. It might not create a competitive environment, but if you really want that, just make the signature race vanilla with a fixed layout.

I also did not like the shortening of Descent Champions. That race was already too short at 40 minutes and now players are forced to rush even more with it being only 30 minutes. Just because a few players can kill Grav after full clearing the last 3 zones in 40 minutes doesn't mean everyone can. Now it is near impossible to kill Grav in time as it seems like only 1 or 2 people can actually do it now. This race really needs to be made longer again, as unlike Descent, it is a rush to the end zones as opposed to efficiently farming the early zones.

Overall, I enjoyed this season and reached my goal of 500 points in record time. Looking forward to next season.

As an extremely casual racer who does only the free points races (boss kills), I'd like to say that keeping points on death allowed me even more free points than usual when I forget to get a cold ring, for example.

Thanks for making this season so enjoyable, and I look forward to async races so that I can get even more free points when I'm free (instead of scheduling my lunch break so that I can get free points while eating a sandwich that I get my colleagues to buy).

I've wanted points on death since forever, even thought I'm too casual to bother with high rewards points I still don't see the point of losing everything on death. That belongs in hc where you actually plan/gear around it.

Sig race was decent I guess. Outside of a few xp starved scenarios I almost never killed rares until act3, but when you get to the point where you 2-3 shot them in warehouse it was pretty nice. More so than in docks since you kind of drown in mobs in warehouse, while docks you sometimes get 0 packs.

Never tried a single headhunter race, tried the tormented spirit once. Was some interesting rng in there. Think I randomly died to mass small monkeys with martyr explosion on death. Maybe if the rewards at 500/1000 were actually good I might have tried going for them.

New descents was ok I guess. Some change is always good, even if it's minor.

The schedule was a bit weird. I don't see how if you have 2 signature races at the same day that they are not like 12 hours apart. Due to this I ended up having couple days where I couldn't participate in either :(

I did no get to play as much as I had hoped, but found the season enjoyable. Headhunter is beyond doubt the most messy fun type of race I have played!

Getting points at death was a really good change, keep that!

Looking forward to the next season :)

"

What I did not like

The Signature race was really bad. The mod was even less noticeable than Bloodgrip, which at least did something to Hillock. Soulthirst was useless.

Come on now. It didn't have a huge impact, but souleater definitely helped especially once you started farming, letting you tank anything (especially those gemling exile dudes in warehouse) and speeding up your movement skill (leap/whirl/dash) for a few seconds. Thats WAY more than Bloodgrip ever did, which as you said, helped speed up the hillock (and to be fair, Merveil...) kill by a few seconds and never even got triggered elsewhere. And even when it did get triggered, it did absolutely nothing for casters that were still using driftwood wands at level 20.

MAN was Bloodgrip bad!!!!! Soulthirst was a huge success in comparison.

The Headhunter solo race was a lot of fun, I agree with most points made, but I am on the camp of the sig mod was perhaps a bit "uninteresting" since it only applied in farm zones, but it was a huge, huge improvement over Bloodgrip.

"

Fightgarr wrote:

"

What I did not like

The Signature race was really bad. The mod was even less noticeable than Bloodgrip, which at least did something to Hillock. Soulthirst was useless.

Come on now. It didn't have a huge impact, but souleater definitely helped especially once you started farming, letting you tank anything (especially those gemling exile dudes in warehouse) and speeding up your movement skill (leap/whirl/dash) for a few seconds. Thats WAY more than Bloodgrip ever did, which as you said, helped speed up the hillock (and to be fair, Merveil...) kill by a few seconds and never even got triggered elsewhere. And even when it did get triggered, it did absolutely nothing for casters that were still using driftwood wands at level 20.

MAN was Bloodgrip bad!!!!! Soulthirst was a huge success in comparison.

Your experience might have been different than mine but I never noticed any difference between 10-20 souls (usually the most I ever got up to) and 0 souls in terms of farming faster. This might have been cause I farmed Northern Forest (yes I'm slow). Also, I typically do not find it worth it to kill rares. I always thought it was better to skip them and spend that time killing whites/blues further in given how long it usually takes to kill rares.

Also to clarify, Soulthirst as a season was significantly better than Bloodgrip as a season. The Soulthirst race mod and the Bloodgrip race mod were both equally useless to me.

I am not a good racer and never liked to do too many races but I really enjoyed this season. I generally agree with what's said above and I'll just point what I liked/disliked as well.

+ Keeping points even if character dies - this made me not feel so bad if I died, so I didn't skip risky races which made me feel nervous IRL before, also I was faster than usual. Great change!

+ Headhunter race was awesome. Presence of Volatile made this race still be challenging but sometimes there were too many of them and it was impossible to avoid all even with caster.

+ Endless Ledge was much more enjoyable after the changes and I like that it's shorter than whole 1h. 30-45 minutes is perfect for me, 1h was really tiring and became boring after doing too many Ledges.

- Soulthirst seemed to be noticeable only for those who raced to Act 3. Most of us stopped in Northern Forest. I enjoyed the race but it was a simple "70min Solo" for me.

+ Rewards - nothing was OP but I personally liked them. The Princess is my favourite leveling unique, Staff has a cool 2d art and I would really enjoy it with the analogical 3d art, Perandus shield is a really nice reference to new Chitus lore and I like its 3d art from Ascendancy teaser (it must be this shield) as well. I really regret I am not good enough to get alternate art Soulthirst belt, it has an awesome art.

- Points/rewards - I feel the difference between higher tier rewards is too big. Although I really liked racing this season, I usually count what's my highest possible reward to see how many races I should do and it's the second season when I am on the border. I ended taking mad amounts of races just because I was afraid I'll end with 499 points or so. I guess that's just my problem but I won't stop dreaming of increasing number of rewards to 7-8 (10 could be too many, I agree).
Also, 10 points for first item is great as it seems an easy goal for newbies, but it doesn't seem appealing enough. I tried to convince people from my friendlist to try some races and, well, generally failed.

- Schedule. I live in Europe (GMT+2) and EVERY DAY there was a race when I have dinner. I can't move it so could either eat cold dinner or race, and needed to take at least some of them to get desired reward. I am okay with this hour if it's perfect for racers from other timezones but a little diversity (30-60 minutes earlier or later) would be greatly appreciated.

Also.
+ Boss kills. I like how they are designed - except that they have guaranteed points, we can join them later and still get all except the ladder points. This allowed me to eat more warm dinners;) If asynchronous races won't be introduced next season, it would be cool if boss kills lasted even longer so more people can do them.

- Notifications. Perhaps it's time to slightly edit race templates? I have a friend who races much since ages and even he was surprised when I told him Eternal Torment or Exiles Everywhere is a party race. I discovered it by accident as well; checked race descriptions - didn't find anything saying if it's party or not.

But once again, I liked all recent changes and expect the new season to bring even more of them.

"

Iangyratu wrote:

Also, 10 points for first item is great as it seems an easy goal for newbies, but it doesn't seem appealing enough. I tried to convince people from my friendlist to try some races and, well, generally failed.

This brings up an excellent and important point to make. Going to post a separate thread for it. Preview:

Since the inception of racing, every season more than 50% of racers who gain points never reach the first threshold. That's ~8000 racers (in the slow seasons) giving up before gaining even the easiest reward.