Announcing Ruthless

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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!

too heavy for me

Definitely not for everyone, though this gives me no hope they'll backtrack on the direction the base game has been going because it is still catering towards traders at the expense of the game itself.

Ruthless does sound interesting but this also worries me.
After the complete disaster 3.19 was, you would think the ONLY priority would be saving the game from dying, not making completely new game modes on top of a game that is currently in a very bad place. I understand the work on ruthless started a long time ago but you would think everything else would be placed on hold to put out the massive fires that the game is currently suffering from.
I can only hope the seriousness of the situation is not taken lightly or underestimated.

Looking forward to giving it a try, played SSF for a long time now so some more added challenge and slower pace would be nice to go through on some downtime when I don't feel like playing the league or standard

Cool. Can the normal game go back to 3.14 now?

happy for the 9 people who will play this catW

btw SPARE TIME guys

I love everything about this. The only drawback I see is the following quote:

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Ruthless uses separate item filter files which must be created specifically for it. If players used regular Path of Exile ones then they would filter out items that are actually very useful in Ruthless.

Ideally, item filters wouldn't be necessary because items are so scarce :)

Finally, thank you! Can't wait to try this.

ResidentSleeper