State of Beyond Mechanic ~ 3.25 Updated

Good Changes

- We can have 100% beyond uptime in maps

- Scarabs allow us to improve beyond

Outstanding Issues / Concerns

- The "Endless Tide" Keystone currently only removes bosses while harming merge radius for more mobs to spawn. It is often more likely to STILL not encounter a boss even when fully invested into beyond. Benefits unclear & in most cases underwhelming

- Currency from Beyond is still extremely scarce despite being a mechanic we heavily invest into.

- Beyond Scarab of Resurgence provides 100% increased boss currency drops. ASSUMING that its doubling the currency provided from a boss encounter, 2 x 2-3 is still 4-6 tainted currency.

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Thoughts, Opinions & Feedback

If Endless tide removes bosses it should also increase currency drops from regular packs since it also comes with the heavy handed detriment of LESS merging radius. The benefits of this keystone would be unclear to most players as any large benefit of or from it would be in the most densest of dense maps & encounters that EVEN THEN could likely not drop currency.

A second Keystone should be added, something like "Murderous Trio" where we can instead spawn all 3 bosses in a map. Perhaps it provides the effect that beyond portals can merge into a scourge portal when large enough, taking us into an arena pocket to fight 1 of the 3 bosses who have been slightly empowered by the surrounding scourge. This could occur 3 times. Perhaps this could even be how we obtain scourge weapons again?

While I say in my harbinger post I disliked the idea of shards, the idea of tainted currency shards would be interesting as it would provide more consistent drops when entire orbs are heavily scarce in this content. If you do not wish to increase the drop frequency of full blown ORBS, at least consider adding shards to INCREASE the drop pool for this mechanic. Small valuable progression is better than no / low drops.

Regardless of the above keystone, re-using more of scourge league content in some manner for this mechanic would be a good idea.

Beyond is... kinda meh now with all of the recent changes.


Tainted currency shards is also a terrible idea.

I hate tainted currency and think it should have never been added to the game....but I'll set that aside for this.

Beyond is problematic right down to the way it functions. The fact that there are multiple "waves" of beyond is a problem in current PoE environment because we are trained to NOT sit there and wait in a pack for the next one to arrive. The most common strategy across all of mapping is moving from one pack to another, as fast as possible. Beyond is designed to be the exact OPPOSITE of this. It shares a design flaw with the node that lets Maven summon additional bosses at the map boss: the idea of a "timer" of sorts before a new wave of monsters spawn.

Beyond should simply add packs of beyond monsters to the map randomly. Or replace existing mobs with beyond mobs. Somewhat like Lanterns from last league. Get rid of the whole "merging" radius thing.

The other problem is the boss interaction. In what way does it make sense that encountering a beyond boss should shut down the entire beyond mechanic for the rest of the map? This is just beyond stupid. That's not what happens in Delirium....That's not what happens in Breach....That's not what happens in Legion...etc.

People turn off the beyond boss because it is stupidly designed and for no other reason.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I hate tainted currency and think it should have never been added to the game....but I'll set that aside for this.

I'm curious as to why you hate tainted currency in general. I hate the idea of corrupting an item being the final way it is modified, and believe personally that should be reserved for mirroring.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

Beyond should simply add packs of beyond monsters to the map randomly. Or replace existing mobs with beyond mobs. Somewhat like Lanterns from last league. Get rid of the whole "merging" radius thing.

I would ADORE them bringing back lanterns somehow, but idk if to kill beyond. Maybe if lantern let you select the various types of mobs that would be added? Similar to specing into specific beasts in bestiary or decreasing chance of specific harvest spawns. Though they would need to then create bosses for each lantern to make it interesting.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

The other problem is the boss interaction. In what way does it make sense that encountering a beyond boss should shut down the entire beyond mechanic for the rest of the map? This is just beyond stupid. That's not what happens in Delirium....That's not what happens in Breach....That's not what happens in Legion...etc.

I agree the fact that killing the boss shuts down the entire mechanic is rather dumb, I think its setup like this simply because "that's the way it always was" rather than "this makes it fun" or "there is a good reason for this".

Maybe they should get rid of merging radius and make it so that killing monsters has a chance to create beyond portals in the map like normal, but enemies simply erupt from scourge near the player when criteria have been met.

I hate tainted currency because they represent a complete back-pedaling of the ORIGINAL point of corrupting an item.

Corrupting an item was a way to PERMANENTLY gamble on an item for huge benefits or huge flops. Tainted currency renders this "high risk, high reward" almost entirely obsolete. Mirroring is totally different...there is ZERO risk. You get an exact copy of what you mirror, 100% of the time. No buffs, no risk, completely different mechanic.

The better choice would have been to simply just remove corrupting altogether...not remove the IDENTITY of a corrupted item.

The decisions I hate the most across the years of PoE are the decisions that GGG makes that completely invalidate their own designs. It represents their uncertainty, wishy washy-ness, and lack of foreward-thinking. There was no need for corrupted items to become re-adjustable. It was part of what made them what they were.


No less important is the value that corruption added to even the most common of uniques. Even if you got an awesome implicit, if you chose not to socket or quality the original item, you were losing a significant amount of profit. Nowadays....this isn't even factored in. You can stockpile uniques, corrupt them, and then only invest in the correct corrupts. It destroys the concept of risk, reward, and investment that was so original and so well done in the original corruption mechanic. It simply becomes another "enchant", which already existed side-by-side as a DIFFERENT mechanic.