3.20 Balance Manifesto: Monster Mods and Archnemesis

i mean who the hell came up with the idea of thematic name with a whole bunch of mods in the first place is beyond me

I guess GGG had to cave, but I liked the idea behind AN. The implementation needed a lot more work to smooth it out, and progress has been horrible for the past couple of leagues, but personally I prefer one thematic descriptor on a monster, over a list of 5 or 10, or however many we will get in future as they try to create more interesting fights.

Time will tell I guess, which is the better approach.

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In some cases, you were then effectively required to fetch a magic-find culling character to make sure that you maximised the value of the monster mod that you had found.

Exactly that.

More importantly, before that loot goblin system, magic find had been a cost/benefits thing where to effectively use magic find equipment you needed to use builds which didn't rely too heavily on your equipment or suffer the reduced effectiveness of using magic find equipment which wasn't optimal for combat.

With the loot goblins, that cost/benefits thing was eliminated. You could identify the loot goblin beforehand and recruit a mf culler or switch to magic find equipment once you had the goblin close to death, completely obliterating the magic find conundrum as well as adding extra busy-work to optimal play.

This is better.

GGG - "In our upcoming 3.20 expansion, Archnemesis will be replaced with a system that is more similar to the way monster mods worked in the past."

AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!!!!!!

Sounds good for me, a move in the right direction in my humble opinion.

I hope the following overall themes keep improving:

- Game pace / speed: PoE is the most enjoyable ARPG for me in this aspect;
- Clear visual / text hints to avoid inexplicable (or hard to understand) one shots or "immortal" monsters;
- Build diversity: no comments needed.

Keep the good work, thanks GGG.

POG

Wow, you didn't octuple down. Either the old GGG still lives on, or this is a red herring for the madness to come.

This all sounds very good, save for one thing. I do not have any clue why it took so long to revert Archnemesis like the whole community has clamored for since its inception - if this is indeed as good as it sounds. I do fear, however, about this section:

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In the new system, we have added a significant pool of new rewards to rares, but the reward that is on the monster is hidden (and not associated with a specific mod), so you don't know what kind of rewards you will get until you kill the monster. Rare monsters with more mods are more likely to have these special hidden reward mods. This new reward system smooths out the spikiness that the Archnemesis reward system had.

That seems very much like certain players will be getting piles and piles of divines/exalts exactly like before, with or without cullers, regardless of spikiness, despite the ability to see "Innocence-Touched" or whatever. I really don't think this is a solution, based on this description. Simply making it "hidden" just kind of makes it the exact same thing, since we were already engaging harder monsters, out of spite if nothing else. I really hope this is revisited because it sounds like we still might get 30 flasks from a hard rare.

How about just removing on-death effects to really simplify the system? Does literally anyone like these? What's the point? Why are we punished for killing monsters in an ARPG? These don't add difficulty unless you're completely new to the interaction, they don't add anything to the monster, experience or fight. They only make it tedious to loot and move on after, if your goal with on death effects is to create literal toxic gameplay and disrupt the players time, they're great.

lmfao what buffoonery is this announcement??
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Redditors in 3.16: Rare monsters are too hard!! They have so many abilities and I can't read them all!!! Please make it easier to read by grouping related mods into a single keyword!

GGG: Okay, introducing Archnemesis mods. They're modifiers that do things but are very easy to read and understand

Redditors in 3.17: THESE MONSTERS ARE TOO HARD

GGG: Okay, we made them easier by nerfing the numbers on the mods and removing some mods entirely

Redditors in 3.18: THESE MONSTERS ARE TOO HARD

GGG: Okay, we made them easier by giving them less mods. Now there's a max of 4 but most have 2. We also made some mods change the loot!

Redditors in 3.19: THESE MONSTERS ARE TOO HARD I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT ANY MODS DO WHY DID YOU CHANGE THIS

GGG going into 3.20: Okay we removed these mods entirely because players can't remember what each mod does. Now we're going to list every mod individually instead of grouping them together into a single keyword

Redditors: WOW YOU'RE ACTUALLY LISTENING TO US??

Thank you.