Poe1 3.26 feedback

3.26 has been a great league. The mercenaries brought a ton of new build-crating options and made many old uniques usable again. Some combinations were too powerful (Doryanis especially) and fights were not too interesting, but I’m sure it will end up being a nice addition to the core game in some form.

Here is more or less random feedback related to 3.26 and the league.

Memory strands were overall a good addition, but they suffer from two problems:

- Petals were clunky to use and often uninteresting. The system should be reworked. Maybe have some player choice at the start of the map between two bonuses/penalties or have a chance for the petal effects to trigger based on how petals you have. There could also be way more interesting choices and effects such as loot conversions or maybe making monsters bigger based on how damaged they are etc.
- Tier 17 mods are still often bad gameplay-wise. They should add challenge, not frustration or simple re-rolling cost.

Settlers was integrated well, but it could benefit from minor tweaks.

- Workers should always have just one skill (except maybe fishing). Wages are determined by the highest rate, so you never want to use a worker for a “wrong” role anyways (not the one with highest wage).
- We should be able to disenchant from the hideout. Have button to move all disenchantable items to Rog and bonus points for having buttons to auto-quality them (for a price on whetstones/scraps).
- Pirates need something to offset the loss of runes. Now they just give a rather meager amount of gold. Maybe have them reward high-value lost shipments?
- Scarab for bars messes up the reward structure for ores. Smelting ore takes so long that you pretty much need to use the scarab that turns ore into bars. Using the scarab takes away to time delay, which means that you can’t really have that good rewards for ores (or you have to make the scarab really rare).

On the topic of rewards: divination cards have a weird reward structure. Regular sources like Putrid cloister, Heist and delirium give really meager number of cards, while sending verisium to Ngakanu or running 5x cloister scarabs gives a ton of cards. Heist feels particularly bad here.

Going through the list of unique items, I was surprised to see that most have at least some use. There are some that need a bit of work though. Here is a list of some suggestions I came up with.

Unique reworks:
- Shavronne's Wrappings: Add aura effect, reservation efficiency and maybe damage based on how much life you have reserved?
- Stone of Lazhwar: increase spell block to 24-36%. (This is historically what it was known for)
- Doryani’s invitation(s): add gain life from hits with elemental damage?
- Lightbane Raiment: enemies in desecrated ground take x% increased damage
- Atziri’s spendour: nearby enemies deal x% less damage, increase defensive values
- Skyforth: Auras also provide X (damage, global defenses, resistances etc.), increase reservation efficiency.
- Doryanis delusion: higher and more interesting combinations of mods (now that the map has become worthless)
- Bringer of rain: increase block chance. Nearby enemies are debilitated.
- Memory vault: 3% increased armour per 50 reserved mana.
- Harbinger unique: simple stat increases.
- Lycosidae: all damage can poison
- The oppressor: always suppress spell damage.
- Mahuxotl's Machination: should give the old Vaal pact.
- Rigwald's Quills: should have the projectiles fork modifier again.
- Bloodseeker: just needs a damage boost
- Doryani's Catalyst: increases and reductions to physical damage also apply to elemental damage at 1xx% effect.
- Hegemony's Era: Power charges also count as frenzy and endurance charges.
- The Grey Spire: +1-10% all maximum resistances.
- Razor of the Seventh Sun: recover 5% of life when you ignite an enemy.
- Cospri's Malice: chilled enemies take x% increased damage
- Edge of Madness: adds 2-4 physical damage per level, Adds 2-4 chaos damage per level. Nearby enemies are silenced.
- Whispering ice: intelligence also provides increased cold damage (at some value).

There are also some unique maps that need a bit of a retouch:
- Mao Kun: reset minimap after interacting with Faigraves
- Atziri’s arsenal: all items drop corrupted. Chests should drop non-regular items (league currency, fragments etc).
- Hallowed ground: bosses only drop unique items/gold
- Death and taxes: bosses drop x% increased gold
- Acton’ Nightmare: monster have a chance to be upgraded when they revive. Increased pack size
- Oba’s Cursed trove: the chest at the end need updating.

Archnemesis mods were a very unpopular addition to the game, since they took away from monster identity and made combat more about “fighting” often frustrating effects. Most of the mods have been tuned out by now, but there are still some that should just not be in the game.
- Trickster: having monsters flee from you just breaks immersion. Combat should not be about tag and monsters should never feel funny. This mod just needs to go.
- Shroud walker: is either irrelevant or has no counterplay. Makes HH frustrating. Having monsters spread fog that makes all monsters more evasive would be good, but the teleporting bit just doesn’t make sense in combat where positioning should matter.

Tier 17 maps are divisive. Personally, I find them ok every now and them but not something that you need to play to maximize your loot. They have the keys as rewards already, so there is no need to have all the extra reward bonuses. The mods, however, are often just a pain. Here is list of the ones I think are the worst offenders.

T17 mods:
- Deal no damage: this is an anti-action mod. Forcing players to wait is always bad in arpg.
- Less defences: just bricks ES or armour builds. Would make more sense as “less chance to evade, less physical damage mitigation, less ES”, where the ES-values would be something more reasonable.
- Avoid ailment: just bricks ailment-based builds. Should be capped at 90-95%.
- Less recovery: needs to be capped at 95%.
- Unstable tentacles: choice between waiting (boring) or just rushing (non-tactical)
- Reflect: binary choice. Has no effect on gameplay, since you either nullify it or re-roll.
- Drowning orbs: can spawn on top of you. Can be super hard to see with all the effects going on.
- Petrification statues: hard to see and have very few counterplays. Takes control away from players. Should at the very least have some sort of “can’t get petrified if petrified recently”-system.

Some smaller bits:
- Incursion mods need their stats updated (life)
- Many incursion rooms are basically worthless. They could use some more interesting rewards.
- Many special Delve-rewards are really bad. These include Breach, harbinger, abyss, strongboxes, beyond and maps.
- Delve rewards in darkness also get bad after the start. Breaking walls should always give something more than random rares.
- Delve cities are good to decent early on but turn into mostly into a waste of time later on. They could use some rebalancing.

Yeeah those petal skills with F2,F3 are kinda bland. The only times I used them was to complete a challenge to consume 25,000. I ended up just sitting there at the end of the map spamming F2 lol, or spamming them while running around because most of those skills are kinda meh. There are only a few good ones and they're rare. Would be nice for petal skills to get some buffs/reworks because right now most of them are just not interesting.

And yeah kingsmarch workers having multiple jobs is almost never useful, just makes them have a 1k+ gold per hour cost so you end up not hiring them at all. I don't see the point of them having more than 1 job, when the town has enough worker slots to put people at rank 5 on every building and still have some space for spares. It just makes no sense.

Disenchant from hideout would be amazing, it would save so much time of going between 2 long loading screens just to slap some items into rog's inventory lol

And yeah its sad how much they nerfed stacked decks from Heist, it used to be so much fun to just stack "% chance to dupe currency" and get a bunch of stacked decks from chests. Now you barely get any and Heist has just fallen behind other content when it comes to div card rewards.

Mao Kun and Tawhua Whuahu-whatever(unique strand) are 2 maps I dread doing every league, so a rework of a lot of the more boring/annoying to run unique maps would be nice. It's been ages now since that strand map has been in the game, they can just make the boss not annoying to fight anymore.

And yep archnem was just forced into the game even though a lot of people hate it. It was supposed to make modifiers on monsters more easily readable, and make it so you instantly know what it does. They got rid of the fancy colored font for some reason? And now its just back to plain old text just like how it was before, and I have no clue what half of them do because they're so vague. And shroudwalker/ambusher with HH is just anti-fun design.


And yep t17 rolling is pain, which is why I just sell all of my maps in bulk to people who do wanna run them because I ain't touching that until some serious reworks happen. Mods that disable multiple builds are just bad for the game, and what makes it worse are all the meta trickster builds that can ignore most of them so that kills build diversity in the game. Content only doable by 2-3 builds is not good. And the whole "you need a chaos sink" argument is pointless, we didn't have t17s before and the game was just fine. People still use chaos orbs for other things, like map device crafts,buying from Kirac(because chisels from him were a better deal than the trade site most of the time lol) and I just sometimes randomly chaos orb an item hoping it would turn decent in my early gear progression. I also sometimes use chaos on my t16s while rolling if I have like 2000 chaos sitting in my stash, cus I'm too lazy to click scour then click alch again. People will still use up their chaos orbs for stuff.

It's much shorter to write a list of endgame (level 60-70+ requirement) uniques that DON'T require a rework and/or massive buff so they aren't a complete joke except to the poorest of "casual" players.