3.27 feedback from HC perspective

Introduction:
Hi, im ndrazzar and ive played POE for the last 10 years, playing almost exclusively HC. I enjoy HC, both the soft economy reset from people dying, and the scarcity of items, making it so you have to farm or craft your own items a lot of times.

I leveld to 100 twice and 97 once in HC this league, dying once at 97 to a player error with a tier 17 map mod.

Why read this:
I believe the subject of HC is mostly ignored in this game since its underplayed, so i believe reaching out with my feel of the league could provide some insight.

TLDR:

Breach good, game is in a great mid game state, the endgame is lacking, gamebalance is stale mostly because of physical mitigation, and earthshatter op.
Loot on the ground does not exist, Kingsmarch provides too much


Subjects:

BREACH REWORK

EARLY GAME

MID GAME

END GAME

DEFENCE

CONCLUSION

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- Breach Rework -
The breach rework remade the old breach into 3 variants of breach: the fortress, the hive, and the original breach hand.
The breach rework also added a payoff for doing the breach, which is the tree.

The fortress provided a more blight-esque breach, which exists to help slower builds complete a breach. It was slow by design, but was doable by any build.

The original breach hand got adjusted into having a stabilizing bar, where if you killed enough monsters, you would stabilize it and get 1 out of 2 encounters in the middle. The 2 encounters were either a group of rares or a physical heavy boss.
The physical damage-dealing boss is very rippy in early game, but doable after getting gear.

The hive is the rare spawn of the breach mechanic, and the main source of foulborn uniques. The Hive had a pre-start area where you can loot chests with chances for foulborn uniques, and a fortress-like mechanic in the middle.

Considering this is the rare spawn of the league, i wouldve expected a variant akin to the breach hand. It feels like only the fortress mechanic got a rare variant.

The tree provided a ton of mid game upgrades. It gave you a 6 link quickly, and were the main source of high tier rare items. This was especially felt on ES based characters, since it wasnt an anomaly for the tree to provide multiple tier 1 modded items, making ES gear very cheap.
This was also felt in the unique item part of the game. A node on the unique tree branch rerolled every unique twice and kept the rarest outcome, which made the tree make a lot of tier 0 uniques.

The tree combined with breach, gave this league a very strong mid game.


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- Early Game -

I consider Early game to be campaign + getting 4 voidstones.

gameplay wise the early game was very enjoyable this patch. The asynchronous trading made it easy to access gear, and the breach mechanic was a surefire way of getting through the early game safely, with all the target-able upgrades in the tree.

The meta for early game characters were slammers per usual, but fewer people played slams this league in comparison to its power. Elementalist was bugged on launch, so more people than expected died on elemtalist, but the bug got fixed and elementalist resumed its position as the best ascendancy.

The atlas tree also still is the strongest mechanic in the game, making it so your build can taylor into providing something for the market or farm bubblegum through Expedition/Blight/Delirium. After beasts were able to be faustusd, anything on the atlas tree would make you money.


- Mid Game -

I consider Mid game to be your first atlas farming mechanic with all voidstones. You are around level 96 now, and you have acquired atleast 20 divines in gear.

The midgame was dominated by shipping 10k blue zanthium to kahlguur, and anyone who didnt do ships fell behind. It even evolved further in my friends group, we began sending 10k blue zanthium and 240k dust, making the stack of divines be able to reach 5 now instead of 2.

This insane inflation made expensive items explode in value after 2 weeks, but before that the ship provided with a lot of buying power.

The farming mechanics were -very- tilted towards tile/chest based loot, because since Lake of Kalandra, the base game has abysmal droprates on items. This nerf on loot has been held in check by broken leagues since then, giving us a ton of loot to cover it up.

This is the first league where the league mechanic drops an amount of loot comparable to base game, which is next to nothing.

The dominating farming strategies were ritual, red altars, breach, bossing, destructive play.

Some foulborn uniques were also beginning to surface as new builds, which were a nice addition to the game.


- End Game -
Your farming strat is now fully juiced, you farm t17s, you have over a mirror invested in gear, and you are level 99.

The endgame in HC trade was acquiring gold for Kingsmarch, to get mappers and ships running. The most sought after item was mirrors, but they dried up completely, since only mappers really provided them.

Stackers dominated the league. It was around 80:20 of Int to strength stacking, and both outscaled the entire game.

Int stackers in particular outscaled easily this league because of the tree providing so many fractured bases, either 84 ES perfect prefix items, or fractured INT items.

The endgame was lacking to say the least. The best endgame farm with scarabs was farming other scarabs, which were buffed in a mid-league patch.
Boxes, Harby, Ultimatum, Scarabs, bossing, valdo bossing were the best farming strategies for HC endgame. Bossing especially was really profitable.

Another farming strat also surfaced mid-league with the Divination scarab of Plenty. This scarab spawned heavy hitting monsters, that had 1000% increased chance of dropping div cards. These mobs obeyed your map scrying, so they were the easiest way to farm Apothecaries. Funnily enough, 1000% was the old quantity slapped onto league monsters before Lake of Kalandra, so they are a time capsule to the old droprates.

Item acquisition also slowed down. The truly rare items were now 150d (progenesis, emperors mastery, your favorite forbidden flesh flame combo) And Mageblood hit 430d, which was 1.5 mirror at the time.

Mirrors then dried out, and went up to 500d each after a certain int stacker helm was made.

The best build in the game was int accuracy stacking jugg, using the new foulborn HOWA to get % accuracy for your int. Nothing came close.
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- Defences -

The main scaling issue of POE 1 is the number at the bottom left screen. ES has evolved so far beyond life that investing into a life build past 50 divines feels like trolling, unless you are playing slams or have access to extremely rare items like Progenesis or Defiance of Destiny.

ES builds stack INT, because it provides flat mana and % es, meaning your existing items provide way more than they should provide in comparison to life based builds. The life based builds suck late game, because they rely on either armour or evasion, which are 2 mechanics that the game can render useless with random mods. Meanwhile ES is an untouched mechanic, except for % less defence mod.


Physical damage continues to be a problem after the phys taken as meta got deleted from the game. Foulborn uniques helped a lot here, providing a 15% phys taken as amulet. Phys taken as scales exponentially, so this 15% made it jump from 68% to 83%, making you take half the amount of physical damage.

The best current budget way to deal with physical damage is through endurance charges or being an elementalist, but endurance charges are mostly located in duelist and marauder area. It is very hard to generate them.
It is not hard to be an elementalist though, so this ascendancy dominates defence wise.


Bottom right and top right tree feels like garbage now, and they felt like garbage before getting suppression nerfed. The suppression nerf changed nothing, but the trickster nerf removed all right side enjoyers from the game.

Aura-wise, Flesh and stone, Arctic Armour, the purities and Discipline are the best auras. Determination and Grace are early game auras, and if you rely on them later on it feels like you have a weak character.

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- conclusion -

All in all a fantastic league. Not having to trade with others to acquire gear is amazing, and the breach mechanic were very forgiving (maybe too forgiving). Only thing lacking in this patch were more gem balance changes, both nerfs and buffs, and the scarab update to buff endgame, which got delayed to 3.28
Defence wise the game continues to be left-side tree dominated, and having life on your build means you have to invest way more to get tanky.
Item wise the new foulborn uniques are fantastic, and i hope they go core with a few adjustments (cough cough HOWA cough cough)
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- Suggestions -

I believe the right side tree is too weak, and needs to be updated. I do not understand why life nodes on the right side tree are both scarce and weak in comparison to the left side tree.

Defence wise ES is too strong, but only too strong when int stacking. I believe Int needs to give flat ES and not % ES anymore, to even out the playing field between ES and Life.
Life needs a percentage scaling tool somehow. Armour and Evasion does not cut it, since the game itself can render both useless randomly. Maybe tone down the punishment mechanics on armour and evasion, to make life better.

Spellslinger continues to be held down by the numerous downsides of the gem. I believe the mana cost of casting spells through an aura, you already have paid a %reservation to have, is too much. Maybe slap on a 50% reduced mana cost of slinged spells, or even make it the mastery and bake in the 25% reservation efficiency mastery instead.

Chaos dot is way too weak, selfcasted spells are too weak, totems are weak, phys mitigation is weak.

earthshatter is too strong, elementalist too strong, stat stacking and mana stacking too strong.