Season Three - What do you want?

We have some ideas for what we want to do with Season 3, but I am keen to get everyone's opinions.

I'd prefer everyone felt free to provide feedback about what they want (even if it doesn't suit others), so I am going to ask support to delete posts hostile to other peoples ideas. If you want to argue that what other people is wrong, please make a new thread in this forum.

I'd love more forced keystone races.

Right now we have BM races. Having CI, Acrobatics, etc. would be fun.

I think it would also be fun to have solo instance-invasion non-CT races. Not sure how that would work though. The idea being forced cooperation where CT is forced adversaries.

Can't believe no one else has responded yet :)

My favorite league type was immolation, and I would love to see other leagues like it that open up new build possibilities and made you think of gear in a different way. Perhaps use other types of damage conversion.

I think an interesting idea is having leagues that DON'T funnel back into the standard leagues (at the end all characters and items are just destroyed). This would open up huge possibilities of different rule sets without worrying about ruining the economies of the standard leagues. Things like a crafting league, or modifying drop rates.

Another quick idea is requiring areas to be fully cleared before progressing on to the next area. This would change the focus of builds in an interesting way.

Judgement Day
Environmental Firestorms with random Lvl20 support gems applied will spawn in the map. Environmental Firestorm levels will be scaled according to area level. Flat Damage support gems applied to environmental Firestorms will also scale according to area level.

Frozen Wasteland
Most enemies picked at random will be obscured underneath feet of snow (hidden until attack range). You will start to slow down based on global chill effect the longer time you spend outside of town. Using skills and taking damage will eleviate the global chill based on resources used and damage taken. The rate of chilling increases with area level.

Undead Arena
White and Blue mobs will never permanently die, resurecting again after death. You must eliminate all Rare and Unique mobs before you can exit the map without a portal or waypoint.

All-Out Offensive
No defensive stats will work, excluding only health and mana. You have instant Mana Regen.

Bandit Market
Cutthroat league where everything drops scrolls of wisdom on death and nothing else. Players will drop their items however. You can reroll vendors with a "hefty" cost of an entire stack of ID scrolls. Your ID scrolls will not transfer from this league to any other. (Possibility of not transferring to other leagues at all).

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AnnanFay wrote:

I'd love more forced keystone races.

Right now we have BM races. Having CI, Acrobatics, etc. would be fun.

I think it would also be fun to have solo instance-invasion non-CT races. Not sure how that would work though. The idea being forced cooperation where CT is forced adversaries.

Can't believe no one else has responded yet :)

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/406831

This would be the best league.

Another thing I would like to see trialled are 24-hour solo races that only allow you to play for a certain amount of time, e.g. 12 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour. A lot of race times are inconvenient to me - people have school, work, other things on, or they just forget. These would need to be solo so you don't farm for an hour, give items to your buddy and then log off.

They could also be differentiated by whether or not you're allowed to play - assuming a one hour race - one hour total across all characters (i.e. you get one hour and that's it) or one hour per character (so if you die, or think you can do better, you can try again).

Some non-hardcore cut-throat races might also be fun. Maybe a few with Blood Magic? In a one hour cut-throat race people don't care about the balance and mechanical problems that currently exist with cut-throat; it's just really fun.

More cut-throat.
Shuffle the race times a bit more.

No more 'vanilla' races!!!!!!!!!!

-A way to swap unneeded reward items back for points (for those who already have enough Quill Rain bows), or even potentially items found during races for points.

-Multiple reward options per point bracket.

I would love for fixed seed to be the standard model or at least have the signature races be on fixed seeds. It doesn't have to have the revealed map, although I do love looking at maps to figure out the best path to take.

In general:

Races with saved progression. Instead of 8h straight which is very tiring someling like 8x1h Races or 4x2h races.
This way you also can realize races where every character has 3 days playtime.

More Cutthroat races with a big BUT:
1. There must be a Noob protection. Meaning low levels might invade higher levels but not the opposite. The restrictions must be based on the potion levels/itemprogression and game progression. Meaning somebody that did Glyphs/Hailrake can't invade players who didn't do the quest. A player doing brutus can't invade players not doing it etc.
Somebody able to use level 8-10 items can't invade players with <level8. Somebody able to use level 12+ items can't invade <level 12 level <17. Of course this fails a bit at caster mods.

The example of party races with bad mannered players showed the best example. The only normal races were the races those players died against players of around the same level.

2. Less lethal CTs. Actif ok LACTIC is not ok. This mode is total randomness. When I get in early <5min I usually won a demi. But with terrible luck I got in 18 or 20min after the race started and had no chance of winning. I would prefer something like: Cutting off certain exits.
Like nothing accessable after ledge and ledge exit leads to a new ledge or town.
Alternative is that Lethal becomes local and everything from ledge+ becomes Lethal.


Specific:

Iron Man + Finger Print races, to prevent players to use the same build and class over and over and over again.

Iron Man: Players can only create 1 character in the event. Meaning they can't mule gems.
This would remove elecleave shadows, templars since they must find the gems via drop and can't mule it anymore.

Finger Print: The gemchoices will be saved and gems given out will be removed after Hailrake/Glyphs.
This can easily be used via a bitfield tied to ones account, with a class byte and a gem bitfield.
This will reduce the same builds on certain classes over the time like Rangers not being to go RoA, Duelists going leap slam etc.

The only weakness would be players creating new accounts.


Wipe Races that start in a different act/difficulty:
Meaning you receive a certain amount of IDs certain level, Transmutes, Augs and Alts act1 quests done with leveled gems(may even be chosen by devs) and have to equip your characters with the starter currency in Act2 or 3.
After the race the characters will be deleted and found equipment too or it will be transfered to a stashtab.



Special Race modes:

Class specific races: Everybody plays the same class.

Chaos Race-->This can be made incredibly hard(harder than turbo less hard than lethal)
Characters receive chaos damage over time. Each hit triggers a viper charge, Vuln curse?
x% of enemies damage is converted to chaos damage.

Meaning this race would make it an option to take CI early as possible, but playing CI at low level is really hard.


Apocalypse Race: Burnining Ground with Added Firestorms all over the place(or better said randomly on the playerscreen to prevent lag.
Instead of burning groupd it could there could be "Saving grounds" and everything else will be treated like burning ground.


Iceage Race--->Similar to Immolation with the difference there is chilling ground on the floor, there are random invisible icetraps. Players are cursed with temp chains. Monsters convert to 100% cold damage.

Thunderstorm Race->Similar to Immolation. Pieties Lightning Storm all over the place damage, Players have one permanent shock stack. Monsters convert to Lightning damage. Monsters cast a random lightning spell on rip like Lightning Storm, Spark, Arc or Shocknova.


Multifarious Race: Guest monsters similar to D2s 1.10 Act5. Instead of common mobs the mobs get replaced by random mobs. Even nonquest related uniques can be replaced by random uniques.
It would for example be hilarious if Kuduko becomes Piety, Vaal, Oak.


Blocked Path Races: Version 1. All monsters of one area must be killed to progress.
Version 2. The unique Monster of the respective Area must be killed to progress.

No more Oozeback Kuduko skipping or no more skipping in general. This could become hilarious in turbo lethal because I killed Oozeback only once in a Lethal Turbo Party race and he took down like 9 characters and rerolls.


Reflection Races: 20% of elemental 20% of physical 20% of chaos damage will be reflected.


Ancient/Legacy Races: Revive old mechanics/maps only for that race. For example when suicide mobs still could be unique/rare.
When Act2 Forests were huge and Weavers chambers always south west.
When Vaal Laser actually did the same damage as his smash 3 times(hilarious if Turbo ;) )


Faster Projectile Races:
Monster Projectiles have 500% more speed-->Can be funny with multishot.
This makes it really interesting because passage becomes really hard and it's not easy anymore to dodge projectiles. Might be combined with acrobatics.

No spell Damage race:
We have following modes so far:
Lethal--->Melee is unplayable
No proj damage->projectilebuilds are unplayable.
Now we need->Spelldamage builds are unplayable.


Savage Races:
All spelldamages becomes physical.
Elemental damage becomes zero.


Rhoa Hunt Races:
You try to find as many Albino Rhaos as possible.


Battle Royale Races:
Players automatically invade each others instances only the winner can progress.


PVP Arena Races:
Players can only progress to level 14 1h leveling 1h PVP, 20 2h leveling 1h pvp, 28 4h leveling in 2 days and then 1-2h pvp and then they have to enter the PVP arena-->The more players they kill the higher they score.


The Fugitive Race:
A Scorebased default race.
Players try to catch and kill a player assigned to them automatically(level around the same) with progression restriction. If they fail to hunt down the player within given time they lose points, if they kill the player they win points. Meaning you will be hunted and hunt another player.


Random generated Party Race:
The party you join will be generated randomly. Monsters always have 6 player HP.
This will prevent the same players to team up over and over again.


Vaal Pact Race:
Players have 4-5% life leech applied to their attacks,skills and spells but life flasks don't work

I'd like to see a change to the way end of race reward items are allocated, more specifically, I think it would help if you could only get (1) of the items (I got (2) Karui Wards one race, and felt like that was kinda weird/cheap). Obviously the more valuable prizes should be rolled first, so the person with the most points gets the biggest chance to score the item, but once he gets it, he's out for the rest of the allocations. I think this would bring more people to the race trying to get that lottery ticket (I loved that idea btw, just not the execution).

Also, there was a lot of moaning about too many races in Season 2, but for me I loved the option of more races. A lot of us older players are very limited on the times we can play (I could only do 11:00 races on weeknights for example), so the increased number of races gave me much more opportunity to participate over Season 1. It was nice.

I know a lot of people want the race ladder to show true talent and not just who can do the most races, so I don't know what the happy medium is. Maybe you can have 1-2 "Core" races a week, races that the best of the best know about and target to be in. The prizes for "Core" points could be better/different. So we could have losers like me racing in "Standard" races for points and then "Core" races for the pros for bragging rights (maybe prizes that change your characters appearance or color/grant a glow around the character to show what you've accomplished).

Just my $0.02. As always this is the most fun I've had playing PC since Diablo I and my first copy of Football Manager/Championship Manager. Keep up the good work GGG.