Announcing Ruthless

So it's very much more about item scarcity than monster scaling, interesting. Seems like it might turn out to just be about more playtime aside from the loss of movement skills, but that might turn out to be a bigger factor than it initially sounds.

I've played closed beta, BLAMT races, multiple Gucci leagues (with my own harder rules of only using quality flasks and gems, so much for gem scarcity) and usually play off meta SSF melee, I enjoy the item pacing of Diablo II and yet I have zero motivation to play Ruthless in the current state of the game.
A year or two ago, I would have been excited but with balance being this spiky and the game being this deadly and demanding of what your build needs to handle, I'll give it a try once but it's just not the right game for something like that anymore. There sure will be some competitions in the mode and some people will kill Pinnacle Bosses but I'll just watch the professionals suffer. I doubt it will be anything long term.

THE PAIN, the pain ..., I like it ! ;)

This sounds AWESOME. Can't wait to try it.

Full post about a new mode coming in 3.20 mainly aimed at streamers. Who will in most cases be pressured into playing the mode to see how "hard" they are. Which feeds into the stupid bro culture on Twitch.

Would have announced Ruthless AFTER you went through how you plan to fix the base game.

You know the thing most of your player base will be playing the most.

Also, HC will be dead from the get-go in 3.20. Then the fact SC-HCSSF players will just move over to this making that mode pretty much pointless.

Ehh. Not my thing, as this sounds like worse gear than D1 and more early grind than lategame D2, but what do I know, and more power to those excited to play. To future Ruthless Hardcore SSF players, I salute you.

Sounds brutal fun for those who want a game mode like this.
now us, basic trade league players, can we get back our fun game tho? as it was? like in 3.13? pls Chris?

Alpha please, I want to be destroyed.

Ruthless should have been a November event for testing purposes.

Ruthless 3.19 + Archnemesis mods, is the game still playable?

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If you don't like the sound of it, then it's probably best you continue playing the regular Path of Exile modes.

No worries, it can't be worse than the other modes after 5 leagues of nerfs

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Ruthless is not consuming significant development resources.

We know, all resources are being consumed by PoE2. We are under no illusion anything is being done for PoE1 beyond the absolute necessary to sustain the 60% retention.

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In a world where your items are far below par, every item drop has the potential to be the breakthrough one you need.

Yes, we know, Mageblood. Everything else will be just as useless as it is now. Dropping a belt with t1 life and 2x t1 res won't feel good, if that's roughly what you need to even get close to white maps by now.

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Ruthless is a mode where most items are normal rarity. You don't see a lot of magic items, and even fewer rare items. But finding a rare item of a base type you're looking for feels amazing.

This simply means that people will play miners and summoners and pretty much any other build that relies as little on items as possible. Which also means that finding anything new still won't feel "amazing", because it won't really be an upgrade. Builds that would feel the impact just won't get from the spot to begin with.

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Ruthless is nostalgic. We picked the name partly because it was what the third of four difficulty levels was called back in closed beta.

PoE got popular because of the amount of content and the power creep, not because of what it was. Stop making the game harder with every patch, nobody wants it. Hopefully the numbers of Ruthless will show that, so I guess there's a positive.

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Item drops are not allocated to specific party members. Looting is entirely free-for-all. Items really matter. Better pick them up before someone else does.

Nice! Nothing better than toxic co-op!