3.20 Balance Manifesto: Eldritch Altars

How many upside mods are being added? We currently have 25 general upsides, if this is being changed into specific I'm guessing there will be many more. Will the strength of the upside change since the pool is diluted?

The reason boss rushing was optimal was that it removed 9 upsides from the pool and the effective mod pool then became 8 mods. By adding 8 mods you run the risk of doubling the variance of the eldritch system. This might create another "loot goblin" system where you get the perfect mods every 100 maps and then you make 80% of your currency.

Is this your intent with this change? If upsides are not boosted then you are cutting the value of an altar by each mod added. Double basic currency is better than double divine orbs (is a divine a basic currency?).

With the 1/3 reduction of the loot from the altars the guaranteed rewards from map boss might be the best choice for everyone.

I have a hard time seeing how this new system will keep altars viable for the difficulty of running them. I might however have misunderstood how the mods will change.

Thanks for the post,
Question for the faq: currently lesser and greater eldritch currency are a sort of patch that holds up your mods (with some uses due to the nature of eld annul/chaos/ex) until you can invest in farming grand currency. only at that point the crafting starts with orbs of conflict and so. Issue is that with the pool that diluted (and needing tier 3 upgrades to see any changes to the mod in some cases!) finding the correct mod takes around 60-80 tries on average, spamming grand. And you need to do it 3 times per item if you want a t4 mod.

Keeping in mind that it's out of the equation to start craftiing on a "dropped" grand-implicit item due to the fact that desirable mods need to be imported from temple/essence/fracture/fossils and that most of the grand eldritch currency comes exclusively from wrath of the cosmos, will there be a compensation to the droprate of grand embers/ichors, maybe in the form of an altar mod that upgrades dropped currency?

maNERFesto

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Elasmo wrote:

This is good stuff. Trash mobs should not be as rewarding as bosses, ever, at any level of investment. Altar nerfs and Maven boss buffs are both appreciated.

Other suggestions for improvement: 1) Make map bosses unreachable until a certain percentage of the map is clear (maybe 80% or so of monsters killed). 2) Make SE and EoW influences require some variation in what map is being run, maybe not as much as Maven since 28 different maps would be excessive, but something in that direction.

tl;dr: It shouldn't be possible to bossrush Mesa 28 times and get a SE/EoW Invitation.

Why? If you don't like that play style, don't do it. Lots of people don't like your play style.

"This is one of those cases where the most efficient and rewarding gameplay strategy undermines the expected gameplay loop and encourages players to do things that aren't really fun." Are you sure? Who said that?

That scarab change will help me out with my little stash tab

Oh... I was hoping you'd rework the altars so we can pick them before the map or at least at the beginning of the map.
having to read and click an altar during combat is really bad gameplay. The fact that clicks don't register if the game stutters only makes this worse. PoEs engine doesn't handle clicking UI elements during combat well when FPS fluctuates. At least give us a keybind to select an option like on controller so we can just spam the key if the input doesn't register.

If you want to keep this horrible system of clicking altars in maps, give us the option to take our time reading what they do.
Currently if you want to take your time to make a the decision some offscreen mobs start attacking you and because you stopped fighting all your defenses (flasks, overleech, fortify etc) are down so that mobs do 10x more damage to you.
Give the altars a small invulnerability zone or make the game pause like during ultimatum choices.

The changes you are making does nothing to help this. Actually increasing the altar spawnrate by 50% will only make these problems worse.

This is one nerf that I expected a long time ago, who actually runs maven witness while mapping these days? You have 3 choices for the type of mapping and the breakdown is easily 60/35/5 for eater/searing/maven if not worse.

Some actual choice would add variety to gameplay, and boss rushing was pretty lame but hard to ignore. Overall good changes.

I just hope the rusted scarab drop rate is decent, but with the 3:1 recipe also being added, I'm worried it won't be. Personally, I prefer rusted scarabs be widely available and keep the polished/gilded/winged as meaningful league rewards. Just to have base access to league mechanics while mapping without needing to rely so heavily on trade.

Very nice!

[We're also adding a vendor recipe that can be used to upgrade Scarabs between tiers using the usual 3:1 ratio (up to Gilded Scarabs). We are also adding an 'Upgrade' button in the Fragment Stash Tab that can upgrade your Scarabs, like the one in the Essence tab.]

Nice....